School Staff Autonomy and Educational Performance: Within‐School‐Type Evidence

In this paper, we show the effect of school staff autonomy on educational performance. The value‐added compared to the existing body of literature is that we employ variation in autonomy within the same country and within the same school type in order to reduce the omitted variable problem. To fully capture the informational advantage of local actors, we define autonomy as the operational empowerment of the school's direction and teachers. The Flemish secondary school system in Belgium is analysed because it displays unique within‐school‐type variation in school staff autonomy. This variation originates from autonomously operating school governing bodies that can group multiple schools and are free to delegate responsibilities to the school staff. This variation is likely exogenous because it is mainly driven by approximately random variation in characteristics and composition of the school boards. Combining detailed school‐level and pupil‐level data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2006 study with a semi‐parametric hierarchical model, we find a strong positive effect of school staff autonomy on educational performance. The result is shown to be robust to problems of reverse causality and simultaneity.