A Service of Leibniz-Informationszentrum econstor Wirtschaft Leibniz Information Centre Make Your Publications Visible. zbw for Economics Böhlmark, Anders; Grönqvist, Erik; Vlachos, Jonas Working Paper The headmaster ritual: The importance of management for school outcomes Working Paper, No. 2012:16 Provided in Cooperation with: IFAU - Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy, Uppsala Suggested Citation: Böhlmark, Anders; Grönqvist, Erik; Vlachos, Jonas (2012) : The headmaster ritual: The importance of management for school outcomes, Working Paper, No. 2012:16, Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy (IFAU), Uppsala This Version is available at: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/82245 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Terms of use: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. personal and scholarly purposes. 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The assignment includes: the effects of labour market and educational policies, studies of the functioning of the labour market and the labour market effects of social insurance policies. IFAU shall also disseminate its results so that they become accessible to different interested parties in Sweden and abroad. IFAU also provides funding for research projects within its areas of interest. The deadline for applications is October 1 each year. Since the researchers at IFAU are mainly economists, researchers from other disciplines are encouraged to apply for funding. IFAU is run by a Director-General. The institute has a scientific council, consisting of a chairman, the Director-General and five other members. Among other things, the scientific council proposes a decision for the allocation of research grants. A reference group including representatives for employer organizations and trade unions, as well as the ministries and authorities concerned is also connected to the institute. Postal address: P.O. Box 513, 751 20 Uppsala Visiting address: Kyrkogårdsgatan 6, Uppsala Phone: +46 18 471 70 70 Fax: +46 18 471 70 71 [email protected] www.ifau.se Papers published in the Working Paper Series should, according to the IFAU policy, have been discussed at seminars held at IFAU and at least one other academic forum, and have been read by one external and one internal referee. They need not, however, have undergone the standard scrutiny for publication in a scientific journal. The purpose of the Working Paper Series is to provide a factual basis for public policy and the public policy discussion. ISSN 1651-1166 The headmaster ritual: the importance of management for school outcomesa by Anders Böhlmark,b Erik Grönqvistc and Jonas Vlachosd September 24, 2012 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 JEL-codes: D, I, J a We have benefited from discussions and comments from Marianne Bertrand, Henrik Cronqvist, Caroline Hall, Per Johansson, Markus Jäntti, Jonas Lagerström, Erica Lindahl, Andrew Leigh, Peter McHenry and from seminar participants at The Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy (IFAU), the Swedish Institute for Social Research (SOFI), and the IFN conference on schooling 2009, EALE/SOLE 2010, AEA 2011. b Swedish Institute for Social Research (SOFI), Stockholm University, SE-106 91 Stockholm, Sweden. Email: [email protected]. c The Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy (IFAU), P.O. Box 513, SE-751 20 Uppsala, Sweden. Email: [email protected] d Department of Economics, Stockholm University, the Research Institute of Industrial Economics (IFN) and CEPR, SE-106 91 Stockholm, Sweden. Email: [email protected] IFAU – The headmaster ritual 1 Table of contents 1 Introduction ......................................................................................................... 3 2 How principals can affect schooling outcomes ................................................... 6 2.1 The scope for principal discretion ....................................................................... 7 2.2 Principals in the Swedish school system ............................................................. 8 3 Empirical strategy and data ............................................................................... 10 3.1 Empirical strategy .............................................................................................. 11 3.2 The school-principal sample ............................................................................. 12 3.3 School level outcomes ....................................................................................... 14 3.4 School and principal level characteristics ......................................................... 16 3.5 Summary statistics ............................................................................................. 18 4 Results ............................................................................................................... 19 4.1 Principal fixed effects ........................................................................................ 20 4.2 Robustness of the principal fixed effects .......................................................... 22 4.3 Size comparisons ............................................................................................... 24 4.4 Correlations between principal effects .............................................................. 28 5 Accounting for principal fixed effects ............................................................... 29 5.1 Observable principal characteristics .................................................................. 30 5.2 Institutional factors ............................................................................................ 33 6 Conclusions ....................................................................................................... 35 References ....................................................................................................................... 38 Appendix ......................................................................................................................... 42 2 IFAU – The headmaster ritual 1 Introduction The role of school principals largely resembles that of corporate managers. Principals hire teachers, decide how they are remunerated, provide support and encouragement for their staff, allocate teachers and students to classes, organize schedules and work groups, make strategic educational and pedagogical decisions, and represent the school in its contacts with educational boards, trade unions and parents. In essence, principals provide management in a complex and knowledge intensive organisation. It is therefore understandable that school principals and the leadership they provide are often viewed as a crucial component for educational success.1 This interest in school leadership is reflected in the academic literature; numerous studies have attempted to assess the influence of principals on student achievement and related outcomes. Surveys of this vast research (eg Hallinger and Heck 1996, 1998; Waters et al 2003; Witziers et al 2003; Leitwood et al 2004) all voice the concern, however, that previous studies are mainly