Abstract: In recent years, performance-based accountability reforms have become widespread— particularly in the public education system—as a means of enhancing service delivery, knowledge, and citizen engagement with government. While an ever-growing literature has considered the overall effects of these administrative systems, few have fully considered the effect of such systems on underlying subgroups of relevance and inequalities in responses across these groups. In this paper, we examine how citizens of various racial subgroups respond when governments send negative race-based signals about the performance of inand out-racial groups. Specifically, we explore whether No Child Left Behind’s (NCLB) race-based failure signals affect racial groups’ use of voice in school board elections and their use of exit from local public schools. To do so, we combine school and voter administrative records in North Carolina with a regression discontinuity design that leverages exogenous variation at NCLB’s race-based school failure cutoffs. Consistent with our theoretical framework, we find that white and black citizens respond differently to race-based failure signals. We find the whites are more responsive overall; responding to failure signals of various types both by voting in local school board elections and exiting local failing schools. African Americans, however, seem much more sensitive to racialized cues—responding at the ballot box but not by exiting when their group fails. These results show that while performance accountability systems have broader effects than previously realized: shifting the composition of local elections and distorting the racial makeup of schools.

中文翻译：

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当你的团队失败时：基于种族的表现信号对公民声音和退出的影响

摘要：近年来，基于绩效的问责制改革已变得普遍——尤其是在公共教育系统中——作为加强服务提供、知识和公民与政府参与的一种手段。虽然越来越多的文献考虑了这些行政系统的整体影响，但很少有人充分考虑这些系统对这些群体之间响应的相关性和不平等的潜在子群体的影响。在本文中，我们研究了当政府发出关于种族内外群体表现的基于种族的负面信号时，不同种族亚群的公民如何做出反应。具体而言，我们探讨了不让任何孩子掉队 (NCLB) 基于种族的失败信号是否会影响种族群体在学校董事会选举中的发言权以及他们退出当地公立学校的情况。为此，我们将北卡罗来纳州的学校和选民管理记录与回归不连续性设计相结合，该设计利用了 NCLB 基于种族的学校失败截止点的外生变化。与我们的理论框架一致，我们发现白人和黑人公民对基于种族的失败信号的反应不同。我们发现白人总体上反应更灵敏；通过在当地学校董事会选举中投票和退出当地失败学校来应对各种类型的失败信号。然而，非裔美国人似乎对种族暗示更为敏感——在投票箱前做出回应，但在他们的团队失败时不退出。这些结果表明，虽然绩效问责制度的影响比以前意识到的更广泛：改变地方选举的构成并扭曲学校的种族构成。