Principals as Agents? Investigating Accountability in the Compensation and Performance of School Principals

Sherrilyn Billger

No 2662, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: In this study I examine the relationship between accountability (e.g., state sanctions for poor performance, or the presence of goals required by the district) and public secondary principal pay and school performance. Though such incentives and standards are increasingly common, the existing literature provides little evidence on the effectiveness of these policies. I explore cross-sectional variation in data from the Schools and Staffing Survey, and use quantile regressions where the conditional distributions of pay and school outcomes reflect variation in performance that is not observable in the data. I find that accountability coincides with lower college matriculation rates and lower principal pay, particularly for the best principals. On the other hand, accountability corresponds to higher retention rates at the worst schools. Though they may not be directly rewarded, school principals appear to act as agents for students in danger of dropping out.

Keywords: pay for performance; school principals; school accountability; education finance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I22 J3 J48 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 36 pages
Date: 2007-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu and nep-ure
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Published - published in: Industrial and Labor Relations Review, 2007, 61(1), 90-107

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp2662.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:dp2662

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 ().