Information, Market Incentives, and Student Performance

Abstract

We use a discontinuity on the test score disclosure rule for the National Secondary Education Examination in Brazil to test whether test score disclosure affects student performance in public and private schools. We find that the impact of test score disclosure on student performance differs between public and private schools. Our results suggest that this difference is driven by differences in the market incentives faced by these two types of school.

Private Education Market, Information on Test Scores and Tuition Practices

“…This latter result can be rationalized with high quality private schools already providing costly signals of their quality and extracting informational rents before the publication. Camargo et al (2014) exploit a discontinuity on the rule of test scores publication and find the same positive effects on learning from low performing schools, but only for the private sector in Brazil. They interpret their results as evidence of the effectiveness of market incentives that schools in the private sector face.…”

“…Despite the fact that there is no hard accountability system based on school average ENEM scores, managers, teachers, parents, and students care about their schools' average ENEM scores. Camargo et al (2014) report that schools advertise their own ENEM results…”

“…However, Camargo et al (2014) do not exploit the impact of score publication on prices as they do not have data on tuition fees. Mizala & Urquiola (2013) quantify the impact on number of enrollments, number of classrooms, tuition prices and socioeconomic composition of providing schools with a quality seal in Chile.…”

Multiple Testing and the Distributional Effects of Accountability Incentives in Education

“…The quality of initially low performing schools as measured by student test scores will increase at a larger rate than responses in initially high-quality schools; and under some assumptions on parental demand for school quality the responses in high quality schools may even be negative. Camargo et al (2014) develop an alternative model in the spirit of Holmström (1999) of how test score disclosure would lead to heterogenous changes in subsequent student test score performance between public and private schools. 14 Taken together, these economic models predict students and parents responding to information on school quality and their relative rank within a school, with heterogeneity predicting larger behavioral responses to receiving a (more) negative signal.…”

Centralized Admission and the Student-College Match

“…Created in 1998, the ENEM exam was conceived to be a non-mandatory one-day exam to evaluate secondary schooling. Indeed, since its inception, the exam has been widely used in schools' league tables to give information about the quality of secondary schools (Camargo et al, 2014). Prior to its reformulation, the ENEM was regarded as a problemsolving and critical analysis assessment rather than a rigorous curriculum-based examination.…”