Relationship Between School Autonomy and Students’ Academic Achievement in Government Secondary Schools in East Hararghe Zone, Oromia Regional State, Ethiopia

Abstract

The aim of school autonomy is to improve the education quality by independence and flexibility in managing existing resources. Regardless of this trend, amazingly little is known about how schools use autonomy in practice, and there were many controversies regarding the relationship between school autonomy and students’ academic achievement. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to examine the magnitude of relationship between the areas of school autonomy and students’ academic achievement in the secondary schools in the study area. The study employed adescriptive-correlational survey research design with a mixed methods approach. A total of 522 respondents (secondary school principals n=20, teachers n=347, and zone and district education office experts n=155) were used as samples. The sample schools were selected by stratified random sampling and the respondents were selected by simple random sampling using RAND or RANDBETWEEN function on Microsoft Excel. Closed-ended questionnaires were employed for gathering quantitative data from the respondents, and concurrently telephone interview and document analysiswere conducted to collect the qualitative data. The Pearson correlation and multiple regression statistical tests were used to measure and describe the significance of the association (or relationship) between the variables or sets of scores. Moreover, t-test was also conducted to test the difference between the teachers and experts. Analysis of the results demonstrated that majority of the respondents perceived school autonomy positively. Moreover, even though the flow of improvement was not constant, it seems that there were few improvements in students’ academic achievement as a result of the practices of school autonomy. The findings also show that there were a number of constraining factors of school autonomy in the study area. The overall conclusion drawn from the results of this study was that: granting autonomy to secondary schools may be the best idea for the better performance of educational systems in the study area along with removing the constraining factors such as lack of training, knowledge, directives/guidelines and school facilities, and financial corruption. Furthermore, similar to many of the developed countries, practice of school autonomy in developing countries was also one of the means to improve students’ academic achievement. Therefore, it can be recommended that the national, regional and district education authorities and researchers have to focus on implementation of the school autonomy along with building the capacity of the school leaders.