The Reality of Administrative Practices among School Principals and their Relationship to the Level of Job Empowerment in Palestine from the point of view of Teachers

Abstract

The study aimed at identifying the reality of school principals' administrative practices and their relationship to the level of employment empowerment in Palestine as perceived by teachers, and to investigate the differences in the arithmetic means of some variable: gender, directorate, academic qualification, educational stage, and years of experience. To achieve the goal, the researcher adopted two research methods (quantitative and qualitative) and two tools to collect data. He constructed a 52-item questionnaire with ten domains. It was administered to a stratified random sample of 369 male and female teachers. Focus groups were used to gain a profound understanding of the problem from 20 male and female teachers in the schools of the northern governorates. Results showed that the level of administrative practices among school principals was high. The arithmetic mean was 3.99 with a percentage of (79.8%), ''organization'' scored the highest level while “decision-making” scored the lowest one. Results also showed no statistical significant differences due to the directorate, and the differences were in favor of (Yata Directorate). There were also differences in the variable of years of experience in favor of (less than 5 years), and (from 5 to less than 10 years). However, the level of employment empowerment from teachers' perspectives was high with an arithmetic mean of 3.92 and a percentage of 78.4%, “teamwork” was the highest, while “independence and freedom of action” was the lowest. There are statistically significant differences between the means of improving the quality of work life and its fields due to the variables of gender, directorate and educational qualification. The results showed statistically significant correlation between the variables of the study. The relationship was positive and direct between the school principals' administrative practices and the employment empowerment of teachers in the northern governorates of Palestine. That is, the higher the degree of administrative practices among school principals is, the higher the level of functional empowerment will be. The value of the correlation coefficient was 0.760, and there is no statistically significant predictive ability for the dimensions of predicting the level of employment empowerment. In light of the results of the study, the researcher recommends the necessity of continuing to improve the administrative practices of school principals through continuous training courses, participation in conferences, and the willingness of the Ministry of Education in working to develop administrative practices among school principals by training them to come up with new alternatives to solve problems that teachers may face instead of routine solutions to develop work methods in line with scientific development.