Contextualising secondary school management: towards school effectiveness in Zimbabwe

Abstract

This study had two major purposes: (a) to investigate and compare the perceptions of District Education Officers, principals and teachers about the management of secondary school effectiveness in Zimbabwe and (b) to probe contextualised secondary school management initiatives that could trigger school effectiveness in Zimbabwe. The study is divided into six interlinked chapters. In the first chapter, the problem of intractability in the management of school effectiveness in Zimbabwe's secondary schools is focused upon. The second chapter attempts to highlight the resource, social, economic, political and cultural realities of secondary school life in developing countries (including Zimbabwe) from which any theories of school management and school effectiveness must derive. The third chapter, explores different ways to understand and interpret the realities described in chapter two. To do this, the chapter focuses on ways in which "modern" and traditional" practices intersect in secondary school in Zimbabwe to produce bureaucratic facades. The fourth chapter, which is largely imbedded In the context theory, emerges from chapters one, two and three and focuses on the methodology and methods used in this study. Chapter five, which subsequently matures into a suggested framework for managing secondary school effectiveness in Zimbabwe, contains perceptual data which were obtained from 16 District Education Officers, 262 secondary school principals and 5 secondary school teachers drawn from 8 provinces, 4 provinces and 1 province respectively. Factor analysis of the existing situation In Zimbabwe's secondary schools produced 7 major variables that were perceived to be associated with secondary school management intractability In Zimbabwe: • lack of clear vision about what should constitute secondary school effectiveness; • management strategies that lack both vertical and horizontal congruence; • inappropriate organisational structures; • rhetorical policies and procedures; • inadequate material and non-material resources; • lack of attention to both internal and external environments of secondary schools; and • inadequate principal capacity-building. These perceptual data, subsequently crystallized into the following suggested management initiatives: • establishment of goals and outcomes achievable by the majority of learners; • establishment of clear and contextualised indicators for secondary schooling goals and outcomes; • establishment of democratic and flexible organisational and secondary school management processes; and • replacement of ''ivory tower", rhetoria~l policies and procedures with contextualised ones