A study carried out by Pablo Muñoz, an academic from the Department of Industrial Engineering and a researcher at the Institute for the Investigation of Market Imperfections (MIPP), also found that under this system the probability of poorly evaluated teachers being fired increased and also increased the scores of the SIMCE and PSU tests of the students, among other things.
Management is a key resource for both public and private companies, but identifying and hiring effective managers remains a challenge. Since the 1980s, the hiring of public school principals in Chile has been the responsibility of the municipalities. This has given local politicians a significant degree of discretion over school staff appointments. A characteristic that in similar contexts has been associated with negative effects on student outcomes.
In 2003, the selection of executives via High Public Management (ADP) was established, whose objective was to provide government institutions -through public and transparent tenders- with executives with proven management and leadership capacity to execute effectively and efficiently. public policies defined by the authority. Along with this, in order to reduce the discretion of politicians regarding the appointment of school principals, in 2011 the Law of Quality and Equity in Education was promulgated, which incorporated the selection of public school principals into the ADP process.
Under the new system, local politicians still have a say in director appointments, but only after a transparent competition has shortlisted a subset of candidates based on merit and suitability. The contests are publicly announced and involve members of the educational community, an external human resources agency, and Civil Service personnel.
In this context, Pablo Muñoz, an academic from the University of Chile and a researcher at the MIPP Millennium Institute, and the academic Mounu Prem, analyzed the impact of the selection of managers via High Public Management (ADP) on school performance, with their paper ” Managers’ Productivity and Recruitment in the Public Sector”. In it, they explain how a civil service reform in Chile changed the effectiveness of a vital group of public sector administrators: school principals.
First, the results of the analysis suggest that the appointment of elected directors under the new selection system increased their average quality. In addition, the reform increased the probability that poorly evaluated teachers would be fired and also increased students’ SIMCE and PSU test scores. “The evidence suggests that part of this has to do with the fact that there is a better climate, in the sense that teachers report being happier with the director,” the academic explained.
To this is added that “there are also fewer complaints from parents to the Superintendency of Education in schools where this policy is adopted.” Also, a lower turnover of teachers who are of high quality according to their teacher evaluation scores. “In other words, it also seems that politics affects the composition of the teaching staff,” said the researcher.
In terms of equity, a preliminary estimate suggests that the impact of the reform on the effectiveness of principals reduced the gap in qualifications between public and private courses by around 10%.
In conclusion, they found that public schools appoint more effective managers after increasing the competitiveness and transparency of their selection process. In this sense, the results of the study show that better hiring policies can improve the provision of services in the public sector, despite rigid salary schemes.
In short, the professor from the University of Chile states, the benefits of the ADP system “are basically that it is possible to evaluate the effectiveness of a policy that is not minor and that means a State expense.” In educational terms, the DII academic points out, “paying attention to the leadership within public institutions, in this case school principals, has the benefit of knowing that whatever they do is at the level of the entire school community, in this case teachers, parents and students”.
To estimate the effectiveness of principals, they used panel data at the student-year-subject level. This dashboard covers the period from 2011 to 2016 and has information about subject-specific course grades for all students, grades one through twelve. They then complemented this data set with a national census of teachers that contains valuable information on the specific subjects and classrooms they teach each year, as well as their characteristics, such as gender, age, type of degree, contract hours.
They also used data from an annual school panel that includes various characteristics of the school, such as the type of school management, an indicator if the school is located in a rural area, its total enrollment, fraction of disadvantaged students, among others. Complementing this data with the characteristics of the municipalities where the schools are located.
With all these data, they measured the effectiveness of principals using an extension of the canonical model of teacher added value and evaluated the effect of the reform using a differences-in-differences approach.
Chile is a country where public spending on education represents more than a fifth of the budget, and the efficiency and equity of educational policy are often at the center of political debate. Drawing on administrative data and quasi-experimental variation, the results of this research show that limiting the discretion of local politicians over the appointment of school principals can be an effective way to improve public sector performance. Since principals have an impact on all the students who attend their schools, policies aimed at hiring better principals could be an efficient way to improve the quality of public schools.
In this sense, policies such as providing managerial training to the directors of these schools or giving them greater autonomy could strengthen the effects of more competitive and transparent hiring.
MIPP Chile 2024