| Although it is widely believed that principals play an important role in the success of students, there has been very little research on what makes a principal effective. One of the increasingly popular policies aimed to improve school quality is increasing principal autonomy in school management. Principal autonomy is regarded by many to be one of the drivers of the success of charter schools and the federal government is encouraging it as a means to improve low-performing schools throughout the country. I use the School and Staffing Survey of 1999-2000 to examine whether principal autonomy is positively related to teachers' perceptions of different aspects of school quality including the quality of administration, staff, teacher satisfaction and student non-cognitive skills. I create an autonomy index of principals' responses to questions about their and others' decision-making authority and find that higher levels of principal autonomy have a small but statistically significant positive impact on all outcomes observed. While small, the results are encouraging, considering the variety of outcomes for which the effect is observed, the scale at which efforts to increase principal autonomy are already being implemented and the low costs associated with them. |
