As pressure increases for schools who miss accountability benchmarks, students become less likely to be late or miss class—but more likely to get into fights and get reported or suspended for misbehavior.
That’s the conclusion of a study by Duke University researchers John B. Holbein and Helen F. Ladd, for the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research, or CALDER. It suggests that just as there may be a tendency to focus academically on tested subjects, like math and reading, schools may also focus on improving student behaviors, such as attendance, that are measured for accountability purposes.
The study draws on administrative data for 11,000 North Carolina schools from 2007 to 2012. The researchers compared student behavior in schools that barely missed making adequate yearly progress to schools that just made AYP.
