There is clear consensus on the importance of teachers for student outcomes. This column focuses on a less studied factor: management quality. Exploting a quasi-natural experiment setting in Italy, where high schools underwent changes in leadership between 2011 and 2015, the authors show that better management practices significantly improved academic performance and increased students’ aspirations to attend college. The results imply that targeted managerial training and rigorous screening of principals offer a cost-effective strategy for improving student achievement.
Education is a key driver of economic growth, and improving student performance remains a fundamental policy objective. Policymakers worldwide have focused on teacher quality, curriculum design, and resource allocation. Recently, attention has turned to a less obvious but potentially powerful lever: management quality.
The idea that management matters is not new. Businesses have long recognised that leadership and organisational practices drive productivity and growth (Bloom and Van Reenen 2007, Bloom et al. 2012, Saporta-Eksten et al. 2017). But could the same be true for schools?
Schools are complex organisations, and evidence is mounting that the answer is yes. The quality of their management can influence student performance through multiple channels. A principal can enhance teaching quality by recruiting and promoting skilled teachers while addressing underperformance. Well-managed schools are also successful in attracting and retaining high-quality teachers. Beyond human resource management, a principal can shape the conditions that maximise teachers’ effectiveness in the classroom. Strong leadership is essential to foster teaching innovation, support professional development, align instructional practices, and address student needs. It also plays a crucial role in creating structured, goal-oriented learning environments and implementing better monitoring and accountability systems for school staff. Finally, principals play a key role in setting and maintaining students’ discipline, which might improve overall classroom performance, and are typically responsible for how students are assigned to different classes. To fulfill these responsibilities effectively, principals need strong managerial skills.
Research by Van Reenen et al. (2014) based on the World Management Survey (WMS) shows that school management quality is strongly correlated with pupil performance. Studies by Fryer (2014, 2017), Di Liberto et al. (2015), and Romero et al. (2020) provide further evidence that management matters in education. However, a common limitation in previous research is the challenge of establishing causality. Do better-managed schools improve student outcomes, or do high-performing schools simply attract more competent managers?
Our research (Di Liberto et al. 2025) takes advantage of a quasi-natural experiment setting in Italy, where high schools underwent changes in leadership between 2011 and 2015. The frequent turnover of principals in Italy during this period allows us to observe the same schools under different leadership styles. Using the WMS methodology, we measured management quality before and after principal changes to estimate the impact of leadership on student achievement.
In Italy, school principals manage organisation but lack autonomy over mission, curricula, and teaching. Unlike CEOs, they can’t alter core functions, such as the product mix, making it easier to isolate managerial changes. When a principal changes, the school’s management practices often shift significantly, providing an opportunity to study how these changes affect student outcomes. Our setting, which uses school fixed effects to account for fixed characteristics like socioeconomic background and reputation, provides a credible basis for attributing changes in student outcomes to the new principal’s managerial practices.
Key findings
In our sample, the average maths test score is 52.1 out of 100, and the average language test score is 66.6. We find that increasing the managerial practices index by one unit – equivalent to moving from the 10th to the 80th percentile – increases maths test scores by 3.7 points (7.2% of the average) and language test scores by 2.4 (3.6% of the average). These effects are comparable to those found in previous studies on the impact of principal effectiveness in schools (Grissom et al. 2021). The effects on maths scores are consistent across the student performance distribution, while improvements in language skills are more pronounced among lower-achieving students.
Beyond test scores, better management also influences student aspirations. When a school improves its managerial practices, students are more likely to aspire to higher education and to set educational goals beyond their parents’ attainment. Specifically, a one standard deviation improvement in management quality raises the probability of students aiming for a university degree by about one-third of a standard deviation. This finding highlights the role of management in reducing intergenerational inequality and enhancing social mobility.
Crucially, the positive impact on student performance and aspirations is not merely due to the novelty of a leadership change. Our findings show that it is the superior managerial skills of the new principal – rather than the disruption caused by leadership turnover – that drive improved educational outcomes. This underscores the importance of management quality, rather than leadership change itself, in enhancing student achievement.
But what exactly do better-managed schools do differently?
We show that a principal’s management quality is not related to their tenure, suggesting that leadership effectiveness is not merely a matter of experience. When we move beyond the overall summary index of managerial quality to examine whether specific aspects of school management have a greater impact on students’ performance, we find that no single factor drives the results. Instead, a combination of factors – such as better organisation, clearer goal-setting, and improved teacher support – work together to create a more effective learning environment. We also analysed interview transcripts of school principals and found that those who emphasised structured teaching methodologies and career orientation programmes achieved slightly better student outcomes. However, the overall management index had a stronger effect than any individual factor, reinforcing the idea that good management is about coordination and consistency rather than a single ‘silver bullet’. These findings align with theoretical and empirical research that highlight the importance of complementarities among practices within organisations (Brynjolfsson and Milgrom 2013, Bruhn et al. 2018, Lamorgese et al. forthcoming), and with research by Propper et al. (2013), who examine whether university management matters for performance and find no evidence of a ‘one size fits all’ management style.
Conclusions and policy implications
While teachers remain central to education, our research highlights the underappreciated role of school principals. Good management in schools is not just about administration – it is about setting goals, monitoring progress, and creating an environment where both teachers and students can thrive.
Our findings suggest that effective principals exhibit strong management practices, making leadership development a key pillar of education policy. Since managerial skills can be taught (Bloom et al. 2013, Bruhn et al. 2018) and principals form a much smaller group than teachers, interventions such as targeted training and rigorous screening are a cost-effective way to enhance student achievement.
Source : VOXeu
