Perception of Teachers on the Dilemma of Funding Public Secondary Schools in Abia State, Nigeria

Abstract

The study examined the perception of teachers on the dilemma of financing public secondary schools in Abia State. An ex-post facto design was adopted for the study. Three research questions were answered while one hypothesis was tested at 0.05 level of significance. The population consists of 4,806 teachers in public secondary schools in Abia State. Multistage sampling procedure was employed in drawing 531 teachers as the sample for the study. The instrument ‘Dilemma of Funding Public Secondary Schools Questionnaire (DFPSSQ)’, which was validated by three experts was employed for data collection. The reliability of the instrument was tested through the Cronbach Alpha method, and a satisfactory reliability coefficient of 0.81 was obtained. The Mean was deployed for the analysis of the research questions, whereas Z-test was used to test the hypothesis. The study found among others that the various sources of funding for secondary education have not been effective and reliable. It also revealed that there has been ineffective utilization of the available meagre fund. It was concluded that there are systemic bottlenecks in funding public secondary schools in Abia State. The study recommended that the stakeholders should become more objective and patriotic in handling all aspects of school funding.