Improving the management style of school principals: results from a randomized trial

Using information from a randomized experiment carried out over the course of two school years in Madagascar, this paper evaluates the impact of specific actions designed to streamline and tighten the work processes of public primary school directors. The results show that interventions at the school level, reinforced by interventions at the district and subdistrict levels, succeeded overall in changing school heads' behavior toward better management. However, the average impact hides important heterogeneity. The impact of the intervention was significantly larger among school heads who had a nonpermanent contract and among school principals who were responsible for a monograde school. Interventions limited to the district and subdistrict levels proved to be largely ineffective on average, and the estimates do not show detectable differences in impact across principal and school characteristics. The results also show that direct and intensive interventions were more effective than interventions targeting only the district and subdistrict administrators.