Boosting Student Achievement through Cost-Effective Management

Tiago Cavalcanti and Felipe Puccioni

No 20228, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: We investigate how cost-effective management practices boost student learning through a randomised field experiment conducted with 31,760 students from 80 grade 1–9 public schools in the municipality of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The inter- vention, delivered by municipal servants exclusively to school managers, involved one-to-one coaching and on-the-job training focused on implementing the World Management Survey’s “23 best management practices†for the education sector. We also conducted two double-blind, in-depth management surveys, one prior to and one following the programme implementation, to evaluate precisely the quality of the management of the schools. After two years, the estimated average treatment effects were 0.928 (0.260) SD for school management, 0.226 (0.059) SD for reading, and 0.237 (0.059) SD for mathematics. Instrumental variable estimates indicate that a one-point improvement in school management (on a 1–5 scale) led to gains of 0.680 (0.245) SD in reading and 0.714 (0.265) SD in mathematics. Students in schools achieving a one-point management improvement were more than two aca- demic years of learning ahead of peers in untreated schools. The programme costs only $15.22 (PPP-adjusted) per student per year, could be applied to any school and has expanded in Brazil.

Keywords: Experiment; Management practices; Schools; Learning (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 H83 I20 J24 M10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-05
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