The Impact of Sri Lanka's School-Based Management Program on Teachers’ Pedagogical Practices and Student Learning

Education is widely accepted as a key determinant of economic and social development.Developing countries have made substantial progress in increasing school enrollment rates in thelast 50 years, but in many countries' students are not learning the skills that the curriculum setsas the goals of their education. One policy that has been advocated by experts and internationaldevelopment agencies is school-based management. This paper investigates the effectiveness ofa school-based management policy recently introduced in Sri Lanka, the Program for SchoolImprovement (PSI). The PSI established new management structures and provided training andsupport services in order to: (a) devolve decisions for a range of activities to the school level; (b)increase the participation of parents and the local community in the work of the school; and (c)focus schools' efforts on student learning. To evaluate the effectiveness of the PSI on measuresof school performance, a randomized controlled trial was conducted. Overall, the data showsome evidence of changes in the behavior of both principals and teachers in the PSI schools, butmost of the observed behaviors did not change. Turning to student learning as measured by testscores, there are also no statistically significant effects, although the (imprecisely) estimatedimpact on math scores (0.21 standard deviations) is moderately large