School accountability and student achievement: neighbouring schools matter

Abstract Previous research has shown that a public disclosure of school-level results of a national standardized student achievement test has potential to improve student achievement by holding a school accountable for its own results that are comparable to other schools. This article, highlighting a national assessment, a type of standardized test that gives schools diagnostic feedback without having high stakes for students, explores heterogeneous effects of the information disclosure. Utilizing a natural experiment where school-level results of Japan’s national assessment were unexpectedly disclosed only for one of the forty-seven prefectures in 2013, we show that the disclosure improves student achievement particularly when a school has other schools in close proximity, namely neighbouring schools. Our results suggest that informing parents about school performance is especially useful for improving school effectiveness when they can compare results with nearby, familiar schools rather than distant, unfamiliar ones.