Improving and Sustaining Management Practices in Public Schools: Evidence from Puerto Rico

Improvements in management practices have been credited with generating stunning productivity improvement in the private sector. Although their adoption in the education sector has been slow, management-level interventions have been shown to lead to improvements in school quality and students’ academic achievement. However, adoption of these practices in the public sector is often not sustained in the long run. Promoting improvements in school management practices is thus an amenable area for policy intervention, given the need to identify ways to achieve this sustainably and at scale. Our proposed study is a collaboration with the Puerto Rico Department of Education (PRDE) to experimentally evaluate the impact of a large-scale principal training program among its school directors. We will measure impacts on managerial practices collecting detailed longitudinal data to measure short and long-term adoption, as well as impacts on student achievement using standardized test scores data. The study will help inform whether improvements in managerial practices can be implemented in schools at scale, their long-term sustainability, and their effects on student learning.