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

Abstract

In a number of countries, education systems are moving towards practices of school autonomy reform to increase learning outcomes. As a result of this reform, decision-making at the school level has become supreme, and the role of the school leader has gained in significance. The aim of school autonomy is to improve the efficiency of education quality by independence and flexibility in managing existing resources. Regardless of these trends, amazingly little is known about how schools use school autonomy in practice, and there were a lot of controversies regarding the relationship between school autonomy and students’ academic achievement. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to find out the practiced areas of school autonomy and to examine the magnitude of relationship between the areas of school autonomy and students’ academic achievement in government secondary schools in the study area by using a descriptive-correlational survey research designs with a quantitative approach. A total of 502 respondents (secondary school teachers n = 347, and zone and district education offices experts n = 155) were 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 data from the respondents. The correlation statistical test was used to describe and measure the degree of association (or relationship) between the variables or sets of scores. Moreover, t-test was also conducted to test the difference between the two groups. Analysis results demonstrate that there have been practices of the three areas of school autonomy in the schools, that is, personnel management autonomy, financial management autonomy and academic autonomy. Moreover, school autonomy practices in general and its three dimensions in particular have weak to moderate significant positive re lationships with students’ academic achievement. The overall conclusion dr awn from the results of this study was that granting autonomy to secondary s chools may be the best idea for the better performance of educational systems in the study area. Further, 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.