Entrepreneurial to Impactful Management: Income Inequality in Education

When school districts move more administrators down to school campuses, do they get better at reducing the income-based achievement gap? Data from Texas public school districts between 1994 and 2010 show that such managerial decentralization is positively associated with income-based achievement gap, explained by the tendency of elite capture in heavily decentralized systems. Furthermore, this primary relationship was moderated positively by the level of school district revenue generated locally and moderated negatively by enrollment. Generally beneficial among larger student bodies, more decentralized management, especially in districts with a greater ability to generate their own revenue, made the achievement gap worse.