Abstract
The first essay estimates the effect of top school management on student achievement in America. I use newly-collected data on the tenures of school district superintendents—the highest-ranking executive in U.S. school districts—to estimate the impact of individual managers on student test scores. I leverage superintendent transitions between districts to validate these estimates and to identify common practices of effective superintendents. Superintendents have large effects on school district performance, accounting for one-fourth of the observed differences in learning rates across districts. Effective superintendents do not change levels of district spending or staffing but instead make changes in school operations, increasing teacher turnover and reducing teacher absences. The second essay examines the role of financial management in local school funding decisions. Many such decisions are made by school boards, small groups of locally-elected citizens who are responsible for the administration of education within a school district. During elections, many candidates for board seats run on promises of reforming district finances. I identify such "budget hawks" using natural language processing methods and use a regression discontinuity design to estimate how district outcomes evolve in the years following the narrow victory of a hawk over a non-hawk. The election of a budget hawk leads to large and prolonged cuts in district spending. Using test score data, I find suggestive evidence that students in these districts exhibit lower rates of test-based proficiency in subsequent years. The third essay estimates the impact of school boundaries on school segregation and student achievement. At the local level, school assignment is dictated by school attendance zones: boundaries that assign households to schools. I use geospatial data on the boundaries used to assign over 10 million public school students across the U.S., to identify changes in school assignment and estimate how these changes affect school segregation and student achievement. Comparing districts that impose integrative versus segregationary rezoning schemes shows that rezoning decisions can change segregation substantially and that reductions in segregation narrow test score gaps between White and Black students.