One Day Too Late? Mobile Students in an Era of Accountability

How to incorporate mobile students, who enter schools/classrooms after the start of the school year, into educational performance evaluations remains to be a challenge. As mandated by the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB), all states currently require that a school is accountable only if the student has been enrolled in the school for a full academic year. This paper investigates the school response to this eligibility requirement in a regression-discontinuity framework. Comparing students who enter schools right before and after the eligibility cutoff, I find no evidence that schools behave strategically in response to this requirement.