School Management in Developing Countries

We review the empirical evaluation of three school-management interventions: school decentralization, tracking and contract teachers. We provide stylized models to organize the discussion of the results. We look at the average and distributional effects of the policies and stress the possible importance of complementary interventions aimed at reducing inequality when the programs are cost-effective but engender greater benefits to the best students. We compare the results across non-experimental, quasi-experimental and experimental studies, and argue, not surprisingly, that a solid identification strategy is critical to getting the policy recommendations right. Finally, we identify some problems that future research should address.