Abstract
This paper uses new data to study school management and productivity in India. We report four main results. First, management quality in public schools is low, and ~2σ below high-income countries with comparable data. Second, private schools have higher management quality, driven by much stronger people management. Third, people management quality is correlated with both independent measures of teaching practice, as well as school productivity measured by student value added. Fourth, private school teacher pay is positively correlated with teacher effectiveness, and better-managed private schools are more likely to retain more effective teachers. Neither pattern is seen in public schools. Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.
Highlights
Developing countries have made impressive progress in expanding primary school enrollment in the last couple of decades, but learning outcomes continue to be poor (World Bank; 2018)
The Development World Management Survey (D-World Management Survey (WMS)) is a new measurement tool that we developed for this paper to expand on the original WMS tool (Bloom and Van Reenen; 2007) to obtain comparable but yet more granular measures of management quality in a low-capacity setting
We find that a large portion of the differences in value-addition across public and private schools can be explained by differences in the quality of people management
Summary
Developing countries have made impressive progress in expanding primary school enrollment in the last couple of decades, but learning outcomes continue to be poor (World Bank; 2018). The APSC project studied in Muralidharan and Sundararaman (2015) collected four years of rich panel data on schools, students, and teachers in a representative sample of rural public and private schools in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh (AP).. The APSC project studied in Muralidharan and Sundararaman (2015) collected four years of rich panel data on schools, students, and teachers in a representative sample of rural public and private schools in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh (AP).1 The combination of these two datasets allows us to present the first detailed and comparable evidence of the types of management practices used in primary schools in a developing country, across the public and private sector, and examine how they correlate with measures of school effectiveness The APSC project studied in Muralidharan and Sundararaman (2015) collected four years of rich panel data on schools, students, and teachers in a representative sample of rural public and private schools in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh (AP). The combination of these two datasets allows us to present the first detailed and comparable evidence of the types of management practices used in primary schools in a developing country, across the public and private sector, and examine how they correlate with measures of school effectiveness
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
