TEACHER EMPOWERMENT AND DELEGATION OF AUTHORITY

Teacher Empowerment and Delegation of Authority

Teacher Empowerment and Delegation of Authority

Introduction

As demands for school reform have grown in the USA in recent years, increasing attention has been given to changes in the core technology of schooling (i.e. teaching and learning processes), not only in curriculum and instruction, but also in school organization and governance. Accordingly, many districts have adopted site-based management (SBM), a decentralized form of governance that emphasizes the empowerment of teachers, and often parents, in educational decision making. SBM theory is based on organization research showing that employee performance improves when power is shifted to lower organizational levels and when employees (Short, 1992):

* have a stake in decisions;

* are given the authority to make them; and

* have the proper information and expertise to ensure that the decisions are well-informed. A less-formal variation of SBM is shared decision making (SDM), where principals attempt to bring democracy to the workplace by involving teachers in decision making.

Literature Review

Despite growing enthusiasm for these governance reforms, the empirical evidence is still unclear about whether SBM or SDM improves school performance. One theoretical explanation is that perhaps improvement has not been found because schools adopt SBM or SDM not so much to reform teaching and learning processes but, rather, simply to gain social legitimacy (Shen, J. 2001). Another theoretical perspective is that school governance may have negligible direct effects on academic outcomes yet may indirectly encourage other types of school changes which will ultimately improve these outcomes. For example, recent evidence from school effectiveness studies indicated that collaboration, teacher empowerment, and group problem solving indirectly result in higher student outcomes (e.g. test scores) and educational improvement (e.g. teachers' perceptions of program implementation, changes in their behaviour, and student achievement)(Murphy, 1991).

The exercise of school leadership appears to play an important part in the various organizational activities that ultimately impact on outcomes. In one empirical test of this hypothesis, Heck et al. found that principals' democratization of school governance process was indirectly related to school outcomes through its effects on schools' instructional organization and internal environment. Higher standardized test scores resulted indirectly from the extent that: teachers were involved in important instructional decisions; parents and advisory groups were involved in the school program; and teachers were protected from external pressures by the principal. In another study on governance processes and school outcomes (measured as student performance on standardized tests) conducted in Singapore, Heck found that in high-achieving schools teachers reported that team-work and workplace democracy were more strongly emphasized (e.g. the schools were more flexibly controlled, rules were not rigid, and teachers could take action without the principal's approval). In contrast, teachers in average and low-achieving schools in the study reported stronger adherence to bureaucratic controls (Martin, B., Crossland, B. 2000).

Research on change implementation conducted during the 1970s also identified the importance of the principal in promoting school improvement. More recently, researchers similarly have begun to focus on teachers as central to the success of ...