What Do Local Government Education Managers Do to Boost Learning Outcomes?

Jul 19, 2026

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Recent public sector reforms assign more public service delivery responsibility to local governments, yet the link between their management practices and performance remains underexplored. This study analyzes a comprehensive management survey of district education bureaucrats and staff implemented across all districts in Tanzania, using flexible machine-learning methods to detect practices associated with learning outcomes. Management practices account for 10 percent of district exam-performance variation. The strongest predictors are frequent school visits, district-manager incentives for schools and teachers, and staff performance reviews.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages17

Reading Time43 min

Introduction

Study context and decentralization

Research approach and data

Management practices linked to outcomes

Pub lic Disclosure Authorized Pub lic Disclosure Authorized The World Bank Economic Review, 36(3), 2022, 629–645 [https://doi.org10.1093/wber/lhac001](https://doi.org10.1093/wber/lhac001) Article What Do Local Government Education Managers Do to Boost Learning Outcomes? Jacobus Cilliers, Eric Dunford, and James Habyarimana Abstract Recent public sector reforms have shifted responsibility for public service delivery to local governments, yet little is known about how their management practices or behavior shape performance. This study reports on a comprehensive management survey of district education bureaucrats and their staff that was conducted in every district in Tanzania, and employs flexible machine-learning techniques to identify important management practices associated with learning outcomes. It finds that management practices explain 10 percent of variation in a district’s exam performance. The three management practices most predictive of performance are (a) the frequency of school visits,(b) school and teacher incentives administered by the district manager, and (c) performance review of staff. Although the model is not causal, these findings suggest the importance of incentives and active monitoring to motivate district staff, schools, and teachers, that include frequent monitoring of schools. JEL classification: I25, I28, O15, H75, H83 Keywords: education, bureaucrats, Tanzania, public management 1. Introduction There is increasing interest in the role that bureaucrats, including local government managers, play in public service delivery in developing countries. This research draws on the literature in two fields of social science. First, the public administration literature examines the role that street-level bureaucrats—such as teachers, health-care workers, and police officers—play in implementing policy (Lipsky 1980; Brodkin 2006, 2011) . This research, predominantly from developed countries, has emphasized that civil servants often have considerable discretion in how policies get implemented, and thus play an important mediating role in translating policy into local outcomes (Carpenter 2001) .1 Second, a related and more recent body Jacobus Cilliers (corresponding author) is an assistant professor at Georgetown University, Washington DC; his email is[ejc93@georgetown.edu. Eric Dunford](ejc93@georgetown.edu. Eric Dunford) is an assistant professor at Georgetown University, Washington DC; his email is [eric.dunford@georgetown.edu. James Habyarimana](eric.dunford@georgetown.edu. James Habyarimana) is the Provost Distinguished Associate Professor at Georgetown University, Washington DC; his email is [jph35@georgetown.edu. The](jph35@georgetown.edu. The) authors thank Shardul Oza, Roxanne Oroxom, and Anthony Mwambanga for exceptional program management and research assistant support. The authors thank Christina Brown, Aidan Eyakuze, Baruani Mshale, Risha Chande, Youdi Schipper, and anonymous reviewers from the RISE Intellectual Leadership Team for their helpful comments and suggestions. Funding is provided by Research into Improving Systems of Education (RISE) and Twaweza. A supplementary online appendix for this article is available at The World Bank Economic Review website. 1 This has inspired a growing body of research in developing countries on the impact of reforms on public service delivery outcomes (Grindle 1997; Galiani, Gertler, and Schargrodsky 2008; Hanushek, Link, and Woessmann 2013; Faguet and Pöschl 2015; Schuster, Meyer-Sahling, and Mikkelsen 2020; Zarychta, Grillos, and Andersson 2020) . © The Author(s) 2022 . Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development / THE WORLD BANK. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [journals.permissions@oup.com](journals.permissions@oup.com) Downloaded from [https://academic.oup.com/wber/article/36/3/629/6555696 by Sectoral Library Rm MC-C3-220 user on](https://a

FAQs

What gap does the study address about local government education management?

It examines how local governments’ management practices or behavior influence performance, which prior research had not clearly established.

How were management practices measured in Tanzania?

Researchers conducted a detailed management survey in 2019 covering district education officers and their staff across all districts in Tanzania.

Which management practices most strongly predicted exam performance?

Frequent school visits, incentives for schools and teachers administered by district managers, and staff performance review were the top predictors.

Jul 19, 2026

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