Beyond Prediction: Interpretable Evidence on Sustainable School Management Across Countries from PISA 2022

The phenomenon of sustainability, which has been identified in the context of prominence over the past century, has the potential to significantly influence education and its components, as it has been successfully established in other areas of human activity. One of these components is the managerial aspect of education, which directly impacts the quality of education. In this respect, sustainable school management will probably be seen as one of the critical factors associated with the performance of the school of the twenty-first century. Sustainable school management does not simply imply the school’s capacity to meet its immediate needs but also its capacity to function in an uninterrupted and effective manner over the long term to achieve its goals. Some of the aspects included in this regard are planned use of resources, the continued effectiveness of decision processes, and the development of a school climate that promotes cooperation among teachers for school improvement. The main goal of this study is to develop the Sustainable School Management Index (SSMI), a measure of schools’ long-term organizational sustainability management capacity, using PISA 2022 school principal survey data. To support this goal, the study pursues two specific objectives: (1) to identify the main managerial factors associated with the SSMI, and (2) to examine how these factors relate to sustainable school management across countries. Using a quantitative correlational survey design, the study relies on the PISA 2022 school questionnaire data collected from 80 countries and economies. After data cleaning and missing data management, the analysis was conducted on a sample of 21,629 schools and 431 variables. To explore the factors of the SSMI, an ensemble learning approach based on decision trees was developed. The model performance was evaluated through cross-validation, and the variable importance was measured through a permutation test. Moreover, to describe the sustainable management school profiles, a cluster analysis was carried out based on the index factors, and a four-cluster classification of schools was identified. To validate the machine learning findings and to understand the direction of the relationships, a linear regression analysis technique was also used. The SSMI is a multidimensional composite index, which is based on six dimensions, informed by theory: positive school climate, institutional structure and support, resource adequacy, planning and technology preparation, management independence, and teacher collaboration. In the first predictive model, school leadership and institutional pressure have been considered as independent variables, explaining the variance in SSMI. According to the results, the institutional pressure factor shows the most pronounced negative correlation with the SSMI; meanwhile, the school leadership variable shows a smaller but still positive correlation with the same index. Moreover, according to PCA outcomes, the structure of the index as a multidimensional composite measure seems to be consistent. Therefore, the SSMI created during this research can be seen as a metric for the evaluation of schools concerning their sustainable management ability.