IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/22881.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Performance Information and Personnel Decisions in the Public Sector: The Case of School Principals

Author

Listed:
  • Julie Berry Cullen
  • Eric A. Hanushek
  • Gregory Phelan
  • Steven G. Rivkin

Abstract

In many settings, leaders are evaluated in contexts where complexities of production processes and conflicting pressures from interest groups pose challenges to performance evaluation. In education, school accountability systems assemble rich data and report both categorical rating and the underlying student pass rates that determine it, permitting direct investigation of how different information affects labor market outcomes of school leaders. Applying regression discontinuity methods that by design hold effectiveness constant, we find sizable positive impacts on Texas elementary school principal retention and salaries for crossing the unacceptable-acceptable boundary but not for crossing higher ratings cutoffs. The apparent information breakdown that leads to the unequal treatment of equals at the lowest boundary could raise the distribution of principal quality through disproportionate departures of less effective school leaders. However, there is substantial overlap in principal value-added distributions across rating categories, and failure to cross the acceptable threshold does not lead to future improvements in school performance. Supplementary analysis suggests that the labor market penalty to leading a school that receives the lowest rating is confined to the current district, where the stigma of a low rating is likely to be greatest.

Suggested Citation

  • Julie Berry Cullen & Eric A. Hanushek & Gregory Phelan & Steven G. Rivkin, 2016. "Performance Information and Personnel Decisions in the Public Sector: The Case of School Principals," NBER Working Papers 22881, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:22881
    Note: CH ED LS PE
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w22881.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Raj Chetty & John N. Friedman & Jonah E. Rockoff, 2014. "Measuring the Impacts of Teachers II: Teacher Value-Added and Student Outcomes in Adulthood," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 104(9), pages 2633-2679, September.
    2. Hanley Chiang & Stephen Lipscomb & Brian Gill, 2014. "Is School Value Added Indicative of Principal Quality?," Mathematica Policy Research Reports a11ab111ac3a497885e0a736f, Mathematica Policy Research.
    3. Randall Reback & Julie Berry Cullen, 2006. "Tinkering toward accolades: School gaming under a performance accountability system," Working Papers 0601, Barnard College, Department of Economics.
    4. Michael Bates, 2016. "Public and Private Learning in the Market for Teachers: Evidence from the Adoption of Value-Added Measures," Working Papers 201616, University of California at Riverside, Department of Economics.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Jason A. Grissom & Brendan Bartanen, 2019. "Principal Effectiveness and Principal Turnover," Education Finance and Policy, MIT Press, vol. 14(3), pages 355-382, Summer.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. repec:cdl:ucsdec:qt07b5596j is not listed on IDEAS
    2. Cory Koedel & Jiaxi Li & Matthew G. Springer & Li Tan, 2018. "Teacher Performance Ratings and Professional Improvement," Working Papers 1808, Department of Economics, University of Missouri.
    3. Julie Berry Cullen & Cory Koedel & Eric Parsons, 2021. "The Compositional Effect of Rigorous Teacher Evaluation on Workforce Quality," Education Finance and Policy, MIT Press, vol. 16(1), pages 7-41, Winter.
    4. Esteban M. Aucejo & Teresa Romano & Eric S. Taylor, 2019. "Does evaluation distort teacher effort and decisions? Quasi-experimental evidence from a policy of retesting students," CEP Discussion Papers dp1612, Centre for Economic Performance, LSE.
    5. repec:cdl:ucsdec:qt4hh6r911 is not listed on IDEAS
    6. Will Dobbie & Roland G. Fryer, 2020. "Charter Schools and Labor Market Outcomes," Journal of Labor Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 38(4), pages 915-957.
    7. Seth Gershenson & Stephen B. Holt & Nicholas Papageorge, 2015. "Who Believes in Me? The Effect of Student-Teacher Demographic Match on Teacher Expectations," Upjohn Working Papers 15-231, W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research.
    8. Will S. Dobbie & Roland G. Fryer, Jr, 2016. "Charter Schools and Labor Market Outcomes," NBER Working Papers 22502, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    9. Bergman, Peter & Hill, Matthew J., 2018. "The effects of making performance information public: Regression discontinuity evidence from Los Angeles teachers," Economics of Education Review, Elsevier, vol. 66(C), pages 104-113.
    10. repec:cdl:ucsdec:qt5qd8j7j0 is not listed on IDEAS
    11. Michael Geruso & Timothy J. Layton & Jacob Wallace, 2023. "What Difference Does a Health Plan Make? Evidence from Random Plan Assignment in Medicaid," American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, American Economic Association, vol. 15(3), pages 341-379, July.
    12. Peter Leopold S. Bergman & Eric W. Chan & Adam Kapor, 2020. "Housing Search Frictions: Evidence from Detailed Search Data and a Field Experiment," CESifo Working Paper Series 8080, CESifo.
    13. Stacy, Brian, 2014. "Ranking Teachers when Teacher Value-Added is Heterogeneous Across Students," EconStor Preprints 104743, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics.
    14. Michael Bates & Michael Dinerstein & Andrew C. Johnston & Isaac Sorkin, 2022. "Teacher Labor Market Equilibrium and Student Achievement," CESifo Working Paper Series 9551, CESifo.
    15. Seth Gershenson, 2016. "Performance Standards and Employee Effort: Evidence From Teacher Absences," Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 35(3), pages 615-638, June.
    16. Yechan Park & Yuya Sasaki, 2024. "Matching $\leq$ Hybrid $\leq$ Difference in Differences," Papers 2411.07952, arXiv.org, revised Feb 2025.
    17. Cygan-Rehm, Kamila & Karbownik, Krzysztof, 2022. "The effects of incentivizing early prenatal care on infant health," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 83(C).
    18. M. Caridad Araujo & Mariano Bosch & Norbert Schady, 2017. "Can Cash Transfers Help Households Escape an Intergenerational Poverty Trap?," NBER Chapters, in: The Economics of Poverty Traps, pages 357-382, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    19. Barcellos, Thais & Hirata, Guilherme, 2021. "Decomposing public-private teachers’ wage gap: evidence from Brazil," Brazilian Review of Econometrics, Sociedade Brasileira de Econometria - SBE, vol. 40(2), April.
    20. Valencia Caicedo, Felipe & Dohmen, Thomas & Pondorfer, Andreas, 2023. "Religion and cooperation across the globe," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 215(C), pages 479-489.
    21. Xie, Xiaoxia & Huang, Chien-Chung & Chen, Yafan & Hao, Feng, 2019. "Intelligent robots and rural children," Children and Youth Services Review, Elsevier, vol. 100(C), pages 283-290.
    22. Catherine Haeck & Pierre Lefebvre, 2020. "The Evolution of Cognitive Skills Inequalities by Socioeconomic Status across Canada," Working Papers 20-04, Research Group on Human Capital, University of Quebec in Montreal's School of Management.
    23. Cristina Bellés-Obrero & María Lombardi, 2022. "Teacher Performance Pay and Student Learning: Evidence from a Nationwide Program in Peru," Economic Development and Cultural Change, University of Chicago Press, vol. 70(4), pages 1631-1669.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • H75 - Public Economics - - State and Local Government; Intergovernmental Relations - - - State and Local Government: Health, Education, and Welfare
    • I20 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - General
    • I21 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Analysis of Education
    • I28 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Government Policy
    • J18 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Public Policy
    • J45 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Particular Labor Markets - - - Public Sector Labor Markets

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:22881. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.