Aturupane, HarshaGlewwe, PaulUtsumi, TomokoWisniewski, SuzanneShojo, Mari2023-08-082023-08-082021-12Journal of Development Effectiveness1943-9342 (print)1943-9407 (online)https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/40155Education is widely accepted as a key determinant of economic and social development. Developing countries have made substantial progress in increasing school enrollment rates in the last 50 years, but in many countries’ students are not learning the skills that the curriculum sets as the goals of their education. One policy that has been advocated by experts and international development agencies is school-based management. This paper investigates the effectiveness of a school-based management policy recently introduced in Sri Lanka, the Program for School Improvement (PSI). The PSI established new management structures and provided training and support services in order to: (a) devolve decisions for a range of activities to the school level; (b) increase the participation of parents and the local community in the work of the school; and (c) focus schools’ efforts on student learning. To evaluate the effectiveness of the PSI on measures of school performance, a randomized controlled trial was conducted. Overall, the data show some evidence of changes in the behavior of both principals and teachers in the PSI schools, but most of the observed behaviors did not change. Turning to student learning as measured by test scores, there are also no statistically significant effects, although the (imprecisely) estimated impact on math scores (0.21 standard deviations) is moderately large.enCC BY-NC-ND 3.0 IGOEDUCATIONAL OUTCOMESSCHOOL-BASED MANAGEMENTIMPACT EVALUATIONJournal ArticleWorld Bank10.1596/40155