An Impact Evaluation of Mass Replacement of School Principals in Georgia

This paper investigates how a unique education policy positively affected university enrollment rates of public school students in Georgia. In 2007, the Georgian government enacted legislation mandating the replacement of all public school principals under the assumption that the replacement of the principals with randomly assigning qualified candidates to public schools would fairly decentralize and improve school governance across Georgia. About half of public school principals were actually replaced with new candidates and a majority of them were assigned through a random allocation mechanism. Therefore, the standard difference-indifferences methodology is used to compare treated public schools with private schools that are not affected by the policy in order to identify how this reform impacted education outcomes. Using the National Assessment and Examination Center university admissions data, the public schools with replaced principals increased university enrollment more than the control schools by an average of 4%. The largest part of this increase comes from schools with randomly assigned principals. The positive findings herein could tenably impact education policy in developing (and perhaps developed) countries and elicits further research where applicable. The statistically significant and strong effects of this type of reform could cause a positive domino effect in the developing world, especially in countries with similar characteristics and predicaments in their education system.