Italian school principals’ managerial behaviors and students’ test scores: an empirical analysis

This research investigates the impact of managerial practices implemented by Italian school principals on students’ outcomes. We use micro-data provided by the National Evaluation Committee for Education (INVALSI) for 2013/14 school year. Employing an educational production function, we regress a set of student and school’s characteristics, enriched by information from a questionnaire filled by school principals to estimate student’s score at grade 8 (last year of junior secondary school), also taking into account student’s prior achievement (at grade 6 – first year of junior secondary school). We find that the model well fits for student’s characteristics, while managerial practices tend to have positive effects, but low statistical significance. Stronger associations between management variables and test scores are detected for low-SES schools.