Do School Principals Respond to Increased Public Scrutiny? New Survey Evidence from Australia

Michael Coelli, Gigi Foster and Andrew Leigh

No 11350, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: We explore responses of Australian school principals to the introduction of test score reporting via the My School website in 2010. Our analysis is motivated by the implicit assumption that heightened public scrutiny should motivate principals to align schools' policies and practices with what is believed to generate better test results. We use responses from both public and private schools to a custom-built questionnaire administered to principals before (2009) and after (2012) the My School website launch. We find scarce evidence of meaningful adjustments over time, but we do find evidence of significantly different policies and practices across school groups.

Keywords: educational performance; standardized test scores; school accountability; school competition (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D83 I21 I28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 186 pages
Date: 2018-02
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 (2)

Published - published in: Economic Record, 2018, 94 (S1), 73-101

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp11350.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Do School Principals Respond to Increased Public Scrutiny? New Survey Evidence from Australia (2018)
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:iza:izadps:dp11350

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().