School Management Takeover, Leadership Change, and Personnel Policy

Emma Duchini, Victor Lavy, Stephen Machin and Shqiponja Telhaj

No 31994, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Low-performing, high-poverty, public schools notoriously struggle to attract and retain good teachers. This paper studies a setting where independent organizations, including charities and businesses, take over the management of under-performing schools, while funding remains public. Exploiting the staggered expansion of English Sponsor-led academies since the early 2000s, we show that the Sponsor-led takeover leads to substantial changes in the teaching body and the school personnel policy. The probability that the Sponsor appoints a new headteacher doubles upon the takeover, with the new headteacher being, on average, better paid, and more likely to come from outstanding schools. The takeover also induces teacher sorting, with older and lower-achieving teachers leaving the school, and new teachers joining the Sponsor-led school from outstanding schools. Lastly, Sponsors substantially restructure teachers’ rewarding scheme and abandon a pay scale entirely based on seniority, leading to a 10 percent increase in pay dispersion across equally experienced teachers.

JEL-codes: I28 J13 J18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab and nep-ure
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