School Responsiveness to Quality Rankings: An Empirical Analysis of Secondary Education in the Netherlands

This paper assesses the response of Dutch secondary schools to the publication of relative quality ratings in a national newspaper (Trouw). Our research design exploits the discontinuities in the ranking formula that was used to generate five consecutive levels for the overall quality of schools.We find previous Trouw quality scores to have an offsetting effect on school quality performance, i.e. both average grades and the number of diplomas go up after receiving a negative score. These effects are confined to the lower support of the performance distribution. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media New York 2012