This paper provides estimates of the effect of educational decentralization on student outcomes in Egypt. With the support of the United States, two types of decentralization programs have been implemented in Egypt since 2000: Parent-Teacher Councils and Boards of Trustees of Parents and Teachers. While Parent-Teacher Councils have not decentralized their local governorates’ education systems to the same degree as the Boards of Trustees, both programs are founded on the hypothesis that heightened parental and community participation will enhance educational outcomes. Three governorates adopted the Parent-Teacher Council program and one governorate introduced the Boards of Trustees, creating a quasi-natural experiment for the effects of decentralization to be analyzed. Explicitly designed as experiments to test the impact of decentralization, the two programs paved the way for the implementation of the Education Reform Program, a national project for all twenty-seven governorates designed to decentralize education, beginning in September 2005. Student outcomes are measured here by gross attendance rates, net attendance rates, and repetition rates. Multiple proxies for student outcomes are used to explore a range of possible effects. The analysis controls for traditional education production inputs: student, household, community, and school characteristics. I find that educational decentralization has had an ambiguous and statistically insignificant effect on student outcomes. Although consistent with the literature on El Salvador’s decentralization program, my findings differ from the results on the other
three major programs in Argentina, Nicaragua, and the Philippines that suggest decentralization has had a positive effect on student outcomes. The results of the Egyptian case are rather surprising, given the intense international support for the program. My study raises doubt that the national Education Reform Program will be
successful.