Effect of Head Teacher's Effectiveness on School Performance

Abstract

This study was designed to measure the effect of head teachers’ effectiveness score on school performance. Head teacher effectiveness is a process of measuring qualities, actions, or behaviors based on quality performance standards of effective head teacher. School performance is the extent to which school personnel have achieved their short and long term educational goals. Multi-stage sampling technique was used to collect data. Initially, one district (Sahiwal) was selected through simple random sampling technique out of three districts such as Sahiwal, Okara, and Pakpattan from Sahiwal division at first stage. At second stage, all 1026 secondary school teachers were surveyed in district Sahiwal who evaluated the effectiveness of their head teachers through Head Teacher Effectiveness Questionnaire (HTEQ) developed by the researcher based on quality performance standards. The HTEQ which included five factors—Instructional Leadership, School Climate, Teacher Evaluation, Organizational Management, and Communication and Community Relations— demonstrated high level of overall reliability (α=0.88) with factor-wise reliability range from 0.77 to 0.85. School performance data were collected through the monthly visit reports of Monitoring and Evaluation Assistants (MEAs) on the factors such as Teacher Presence, Student Presence, Functioning of Facilities, School Cleanliness; Student Achievement scores were collected from respective schools. The study found that teachers perceived their head teachers demonstrated effectiveness in their institution exercising effective head teacher qualities or practices or performance standards. The study revealed that schools’ performance were at the excellent level. The study found positive and moderate relationship between head teachers’ effectiveness scores and school performance (r=.59). The findings of the viii study also revealed that factors of head teachers’ effectiveness significantly combined to predict school performance, explaining 36% of the observed variance in school performance. The present study provided initial evidence of the validity of the HTEQ. Further, the study found that female teachers’ perceived that their head teachers were more effective as compared to male teachers’ perceived, while rural and urban teachers’ perceived that their head teachers were equally effective in their schools. The findings of the study also revealed that performance of female high schools were better than performance of male high schools, while the performance of urban high schools were better as compared to the performance of rural high schools. This study involved a relatively smaller sample size including one district (Sahiwal) of Punjab, so the generalization over the other districts may kindly be made with caution. Further studies might be conducted over larger sample size selected randomly to get more vivid picture of head teacher effectiveness. The policymakers may adopt and introduce the HTEQ in public schools, and take initial steps toward implementing these quality performance standards of effective head teacher. INDEX WORDS: Head teachers’ effectiveness; instructional leadership; school climate; teacher evaluation; organizational management; communication and community relations; school performance