Is the Standardization of Compulsory Education School Helpful to Improve Students’ Performance? An Empirical Analysis Based on Monitoring Data in Province A

Abstract

The standardization of compulsory education schools is an essen-tial measure to promote education balance and improve education quality. However, when the implementation effect of this policy was evaluated, the improvement of input factors such as facilities and equipments, teaching faculty and funding were only focused on, but with less attention was paid to the impact of the standardiza-tion on students’ academic performance. This kind of imbalance makes it difficult to fully grasp the real effects of standardization and its potential problems, which may lead to deviations in the direction of standardization construction. Therefore, this study used the monitoring data in province A that includes the standard-ized construction of compulsory education schools and academic quality of students to analyze the correlation between standardiza-tion construction and student performance through Ordinary Least Square (OLS). Further, a Regression Discontinuity Design (RDD) was used to analyze whether standardization construction is the cause of differences in student performance. The results showed that there was no significant correlation between standardization construction and elementary school students’ performance, and negative correlation with middle school students’ performance; no substential causal relationship exists between standardization con-struction and student performance. This is majorly due to the em-phasis on the conditions of school-running was set too much, and then the student performance was neglected. Therefore, future evaluation should be gradually changed while deepening the standardization construction with more attention paid to the con-notative development and efforts made to the improvement of the education quality.