The headmaster ritual: the importance of management for school outcomes

Anders Böhlmark, Erik Grönqvist () and Jonas Vlachos

No 2012:16, Working Paper Series from IFAU - Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy

Abstract: The role of school principals largely resembles that of corporate managers and the leadership they provide is often viewed as a crucial component for educational success. We estimate the impact of individual principals on various schooling outcomes, by constructing a principal-school panel data set that allows us to track individual principals as they move between schools. We find that individual principals have a substantive impact on school policies, working conditions and student outcomes. Particularly, students who attend a school with a one standard deviation better principal receive on average 0.12 standard deviations higher test scores. Despite having very rich background information on principals, it is difficult to determine which principal characteristics that form the basis for successful school management. We also find a somewhat mixed picture on what management style characterizes a successful principal. We further show that the scope for principal discretion—for better or for worse—is larger in small schools, in voucher schools and in areas with more school competition.

Keywords: Principals; School Management (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 45 pages
Date: 2012-09-24
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Published as Böhlmark, Anders, Erik Grönqvist and Jonas Vlachos, 'The headmaster ritual: the importance of management for school outcomes' in The Scandinavian Journal of Economics, 2016, pages 912-940.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.ifau.se/Upload/pdf/se/2012/wp12-16-The-headmaster-ritual.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://www.ifau.se/Upload/pdf/se/2012/wp12-16-The-headmaster-ritual.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.ifau.se/Upload/pdf/se/2012/wp12-16-The-headmaster-ritual.pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The Headmaster Ritual: The Importance of Management for School Outcomes (2016)
Working Paper: The Headmaster Ritual: The Importance of Management for School Outcomes (2012)
Working Paper: The headmaster ritual: The importance of management for school outcomes (2012)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:ifauwp:2012_016

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper Series from IFAU - Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy IFAU, P O Box 513, SE-751 20 Uppsala, Sweden. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Ali Ghooloo ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).