Understanding school management with public data: A new measurement approach and applications (R&R at JPE Micro)
with C. Leaver and R. Lemos
[CEPR Discussion Paper] [Online Appendix]
Why do students learn more in some schools than others? One consideration receiving growing attention is school management. To study this, researchers need to be able to measure school management accurately and cheaply at scale. We introduce a new approach to measuring management practices using existing public data and exemplify the methodology with OECD’s PISA and Brazil’s Prova Brasil. Both indices show a strong, positive relationship between management and learning. We highlight two example applications: an extension of the Ahktari et al (2022) analysis of political turnover and student learning, and an exploration of the mechanisms behind the key performance relationship.