Research Team: Lihan Liu, Nathan Bar­rett, Ruoxi Li, ​Education Research Alliance for New Orleans​After decades of stag­na­tion, high school grad­u­a­tion rates – in New Orleans, Louisiana, and across the nation – start­ed to rapid­ly increase in the ear­ly 2000s. This coin­cid­ed with the intro­duc­tion of No Child Left Behind, which includ­ed account­abil­i­ty for high school grad­u­a­tion rates and test scores. The tim­ing of these events led to con­cerns that the increase in grad­u­a­tion rates might not be ​“real.” In order to improve their per­for­mance on high-stakes account­abil­i­ty mea­sures, schools could have low­ered the stan­dards for grad­u­a­tion or changed their data col­lec­tion in ways that inflat­ed the grad­u­a­tion rate. Recent news reports sug­gest that this is what hap­pened in Los Ange­les, Wash­ing­ton, DC, and else­where. But are those instances just out­liers? Did high-stakes account­abil­i­ty actu­al­ly increase high school grad­u­a­tion rates? If so, did schools respond by improv­ing the qual­i­ty of schools, or through strate­gic behav­ior that increas­es the mea­sures with­out improv­ing stu­dents’ edu­ca­tion­al expe­ri­ences? In this brown bag, we will pro­vide our pre­lim­i­nary answers and dis­cuss our analy­sis with the audience.