For years, researchers have pointed to the quality of educators as the key to school performance. On the EconTalk podcast in 2015, Eric Hanushek argued that “in both developed and developing countries, the thing that makes the largest difference in schools is the quality of the teachers.” Professor Hanushek himself has done much of the work illumining the importance of teachers, showing stark variation in teacher effectiveness. A 2013 Education Next article by Hanushek, economist Steven Rivkin, and a coauthor used data from Texas to show that principals can also have an impact on student achievement. Alongside research from Raj Chetty and colleagues, who identified effects of teachers on a range of long-term student outcomes, this research has shown the power of high-quality educators to shape students’ educational and career trajectories.
Now a new National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) working paper from Hanushek, Rivkin, and several colleagues extends their prior work using Texas data to examine the impact of principals on student achievement to assess potential impacts not just on short-term outcomes like test scores and attendance, but also on students’ longer-term outcomes, such as higher education, employment, and involvement in the criminal justice system.
The researchers analyzed data from eighth-grade cohorts from 2001 to 2012, assessing the impact of middle-school principals in two stages. First, they use a value-added framework that controls for students’ background characteristics to examine how principals affect students’ short-term outcomes, such as test scores, absences, and suspensions. These outcomes serve as indicators of principals’ influence on students’ cognitive and noncognitive skills, although, as with their prior research, they do not have an effective method for distinguishing between the effects of the principals themselves and the other effects of the students’ schools. Still, they say that their method of identifying effects on cognitive and non-cognitive skills prior to examining effects on long-term outcomes reduces potential bias. They measure cognitive skills by calculating improvements in test scores, while noncognitive skills are assessed from patterns in attendance and suspension rates.
In the second stage, the authors investigated whether these short-term impacts could predict students’ long-term success. This was made possible by the comprehensive nature of Texas’s administrative data, which not only cover an extensive period, but also capture a large and diverse student population, reducing the likelihood of students leaving the dataset due to moving out of state.
The study demonstrates that middle school principals don’t just shape students’ academic performance during their school years; their influence extends far beyond the classroom. For instance, students with principals whom the researchers identified has having high test-score value added were more likely to pursue higher education and persist through college: Attending a school with a principal who was one standard deviation above average on their metric increased the likelihood of attending college by about 10 percent of a standard deviation.
Moreover, students with principals whom the researchers identified has having high value added for suspensions—perhaps by creating stronger school cultures—had a profound impact on their students’ future interactions with the criminal justice system. Male students who attended schools with principals who were 1 standard deviation above average at on this metric were about 15 percent of a standard deviation less likely to be arrested later in life. This finding underscores that what happens during students’ school years can have long-range consequences.
Interestingly, the effects of principals were not uniform across all student demographics. The researchers found that although the influence of a principal on noncognitive skills (such as reducing suspensions) positively affected all students, the impact was significantly greater for Black students compared to their peers. (Other principal effects were more consistent across racial groups.)
This new study provides new evidence of the importance of school leadership. The influence of school leaders can extend far beyond academic performance, affecting students’ life trajectories in meaningful ways. It also adds to the evidence that shorter-term academic outcomes, such as standardized test scores, can be useful proxies for important long-term student outcomes. Understanding the role of principals could be key to ensuring that more students have the opportunity to succeed both in school and in life.
SOURCE: Eric A. Hanushek, Andrew J. Morgan, Steven G. Rivkin, Jeffrey C. Schiman, Ayman Shakeel, and Lauren Sartain, “The Lasting Impacts of Middle School Principals,” National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 32642 (2024).
