Should School-Level Results of National Assessments Be Made Public?

Abstract

Many countries conduct national standardized assessments of educational performance, the results of which may be published at the school level or at a higher level of aggregation. Publication at the school level potentially improves student achievements by holding schools accountable, whereas such accountability pressure may have distributional consequences and/or compromise outcomes beyond education achievements (labeled as non-cognitive skills). Using a Japanese policy reform that created variation in the disclosure system of national assessment results across municipalities, we show that publishing school-level results increases students' test scores across the entire score distribution, with no evidence of adverse impacts on noncognitive skills.