The Impact of Empowering Principals on Students' Performance in the Final Exams – An Educational Perspective

Abstract

In addition to classroom management, school management plays a vital role in the success or failure of schools (as establishments or educational firms) and students’ performance in general. This paper discusses several issues that were put under seven different subtitles starting with “The Transformations of Principals Roles in Iraq” and ending with “Recommendations” for further studies or research in this regard. It (the paper) focusses on the importance of empowering principals and school leaders through providing them with more freedom in decision making. Also, the paper pinpoints how much control we need to have on this freedom. Some of the roles played by principals, in addition to the required qualities, skills and capacities that school principals need to have or acquire if they want to run their buildings (schools) in an effective and an influential way will be tackled in the fourth part (issue) of the paper. These roles, skills and capacities will be highlighted in light of their impact on students’ performance in classrooms and in the results of the end of year exams. The questionnaire part of the paper describes the results of the questionnaire (in which a limited number of school leaders participated) and their analysis. The last two parts of the paper describe the challenges that accompanied writing this paper like: the unavailability of resources as it was a bit hard to find resources tackling the issue of principalship and leadership in schools in our libraries, therefore, most of the paper was written according to the American and Australian literature in this field. Also, not many principals agreed to participate in the questionnaire because they thought that it contains an implicit criticism to the current educational system that’s why I kept the identity of the participants unknown.