On Monday, 8th of June, Zurab Abramishvili from the CERGE-EI (Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education - Economics Institute) presented his research proposal titled “The Principal Principle: How an Immediate and Random Replacement of School Principals Illuminates Their Value Added; A Case of Education Policy in Georgia”. Mr. Abramishvili is an ISET graduate in 2010, currently, he is doing postdoctoral work at ISET.

He started the presentation with a short overview of the reforms which the government of Georgia implemented in the education system. After he reviewed all chronologically ordered reforms from 2005 to 2007, he presented “school principal elections” in more detail and stressed that this project aims to investigate the effects of this unique education policy on the learning outcomes of public school students in Georgia.

The researcher has the following plans to peruse: first, he plans to numerically evaluate how the massive and immediate turnover of school principals affected learning outcomes. Second, since this is a unique (at least in the region) quasi-natural experiment in which all public school principals were officially terminated on the same date and candidates that successfully passed standardized examinations were assigned to schools by a pure random algorithm (lottery), he intends to study the mechanism itself and its effectiveness as a fair decentralization policy. Third, he will identify and numerically estimate the causality between the quality of the principal and school performance countrywide.

At the end of the presentation, Mr. Abramishvili summarized the practical contributions this project might have on policymaking. Based on his perception the results showing a positive association could tenably impact education policy in developing (and perhaps developed) countries and would likely at least elicit further research where applicable. As Mr. Abramishvili mentioned, the developing country context is also an important element of this work. While there is a relatively extensive body of research on the effectiveness of principals in OECD countries, this project represents a pioneer study in the region and throughout CIS countries.