Carolyn Minter Hoxby, National Bureau of Economic Research
April 2002
The creative and prolific Harvard economist, Carolyn Minter Hoxby, authored this working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research. Her conclusion is that "The costs of accountability programs are...tiny...relative to the cost of other education programs." She estimates the costliest of state testing programs at about one-quarter of one percent of per pupil spending. It's such a bargain, she says, that "even if the benefits of accountability are small, its benefit-to-cost ratio is likely to be extremely high relative to that of other programs." This is highly relevant at a time when state officials are complaining that their education budgets will be broken by the costs of complying with the testing requirements of the new federal No Child Left Behind act. Hoxby says, in effect, that that's a red herring, that "the main barrier to good [testing] programs is not expense but the support and interest of education experts, policy-makers and the public." Note, though, that she is dealing here with the costs of testing itself, not the rewards and interventions that would be attached to a fully wrought "accountability" system. You can download this 25-pager from www.nber.org/papers/w8855. (Depending on your relationship with the N.B.E.R., you may have to pay for it.)