There are major disparities in the quality of education within every educational institution and definitely varies from one school to another. School managerial practices may be an important reason for such indifferences. Fortunately, clear understanding of the role of management in schools would lead to a better school performance and producing more competitive graduates at the end.
Many works suggest many lines of future inquiry on conditional correlations. Thinking of ways to evaluate the causal effects of management interventions such as randomized control trials is a high priority. Another thing is, we only account for at most half of the better management of autonomous government schools with accountability and leadership: what else is important? Are there key characteristics of principals and teachers, for example, which we have missed out? And last thing, what drives improved school management? We have suggestive evidence that governance matters (as it does more widely in other institutions) but what about school networks, teacher skills, incentives, pupil choice and information? There is an exciting research agenda ahead.
Understanding the factors associated with variations in school performance within and across other schools is important. While many studies have looked and focus at differences in school inputs – such as teacher quality, class size and family/pupil characteristics – or variations in the institutional environment – such as pupil choice – few studies explore differences in school management. But there are also studies which show robust evidence that management practices vary significantly across and within from one school to another which strongly linked to pupil outcomes. Management quality seems and indeed does matter for schools. A new finding is that autonomous government schools appear to have significantly higher management scores than both regular government schools and private schools. Their better performance is not linked with autonomy per see but with how autonomy is used. Having strong accountability of principals to an external governing body and exercising strong leadership through a coherent long-term strategy for the school appear to be two key features that account for a large fraction of the superior management performance of such schools. From a policy point of view findings suggest that improving management could be an important way of raising school standards and give broad support for the fostering of greater autonomy of government schools. Autonomy by itself is unlikely to deliver better results, however, findings ways to improve governance and motivate principals are likely to be key to make sure decentralized power leads to better standards.
By: Jackielou B. Guinto | Teacher III | Samal National High School | Samal, Bataan
