Perceived Level of Teacher’ Empowerment and Students’ Academic Achievement in Secondary Schools of Dire Dawa, Ethiopia.

ABSTRACT: teacher empowerment has become the policy of choice with the growing international trendtowards decentralization of school management. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationshipbetween teachers’ empowerment and students’ academic achievement. The study adopted correlation surveydesign. A total of 211 randomly selected teachers were participated in the study. Correlation and regressionanalysis were used to explain the relationships between the variables. The findings of the study indicatedteachers’ empowerment, and its dimensions had statistically significant positive association with students’academic achievement. Moreover, the stepwise multiple regressions showed that, some dimensions of teachers’empowerment were predictors of students’ academic achievement. Nevertheless, teachers’ level ofempowerment was perceived low by teachers. Teaching experience and education level of teachers hadsignificant positive association with teachers’ empowerment while, gender and experience in current school hadno relationship with teachers’ empowerment. On the base of the findings, it is recommended that schoolleadership should build school environment that provide opportunities for teachers empowerment so as toenhance students’ academic achievement. Further research is also needed to fill the literature gap in the area ofteacher empowerment under different school settings. One possible extension of this study is to determinewhether the results presented here reflect the situation in governmental primary schools andnongovernmental primary and secondary schools.

Keywords: Academic Achievement; Teacher Empowerment; Secondary Schools; Students.