Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

When No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act was introduced in 2002, it promised increased transparency of state accountability policies and improved student performance in exchange for increased oversight and standardized testing. The Every Students Succeeds Act (ESSA) which replaced NCLB in 2015 continues to hold schools accountable primarily for academic achievement, but also requires states to report on an indicator of student or school success that is not academic in nature. Without evidence on the impact of NCLB students’ non-achievement skills, it is difficult to fully understand the potential of ESSA’s requirement to hold states responsible for holistic student growth.

A major consideration for impact studies of NCLB is the extent to which accountability standards actually implemented differed across states. Davidson, Reback, Rockoff and Schwartz (2015) and Wong, Wing, Martin and Krishnamachari (2017) find that state governments had substantial discretion in implementing NCLB standards. Specifically, states could make implementation decisions that effectively increased or decreased the amount of pressure schools were subjected to. As a result, implementation studies examining both academic and non-academic outcomes are often challenged by the possible correlation between implementation stringency and the population characteristics of schools and students within states.

Evidence from studies examining the impact of NCLB on students’ non-achievement outcomes yields mixed results. Yin (2009) found that the introduction of accountability policies led to a decrease in female adolescent participation in physical education classes. Holbein and Ladd (2015) found that accountability pressures were related to increased engagement in “risky behaviors”, while Whitney and Candelaria (2017) replicated the Dee and Jacob (2011) analyses with socioemotional outcomes and found no relationship between accountability and these outcomes. Of these studies, only the Yin (2009) and Whitney and Candelaria (2017) studies examine effects of NCLB at the national level. Most importantly, none of these studies examine the effect of ratcheting up accountability stringency on student outcomes.

In this paper, we use a measure of accountability stringency that consists of simulated AYP failure rates for a fixed sample of schools. Our measure reflects multiple implementation decisions made by states under NCLB between 2003 and 2011. Since we use a fixed basket of schools, our measure does not depend on state or student population characteristics. This feature is particularly useful to establish a causal relationship between accountability stringency and students’ non-achievement outcomes. Using data from the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System and the Civil Rights Data Collection, we causally link state stringency rates to students’ health and disciplinary outcomes.

Overall, we find that increasing accountability stringency under NCLB did not have a significant impact on any of our outcomes of interest. Increased implementation stringency under NCLB resulted in small increases in the number of days students spent in physical education, small decreases in the number of days that students were active for an hour, small increases in incidences of suicidal behavior and small decreases in marijuana use. There were no changes in the number of corporal punishments, expulsions or suspensions as a result of increasing implementation stringency under NCLB.