This paper uses new data to study school management and productivity in India. We report five main results. First, management quality in public schools is low, and -2 standard deviations 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 independent measures of teaching practice, as well as school productivity measured by student value added. Fourth, better-managed schools have lower variation in within-school teacher effectiveness and higher levels of minimum teacher effectiveness. Fifth, consistent with better people management, teacher pay in private schools is positively correlated with teacher effectiveness, whereas we find no such correlation in public schools.
Renata Lemos, Karthik Muralidharan and Daniela Scur
1 July 2024
The Economic Journal 134(661) , pp.2071-2100, 2024
DOI: 10.1093/ej/uead112
https://doi.org/10.1093/ej/uead112
This work is published under POID and the CEP's Growth programme.