Relationship between teacher empowerment and principal effectiveness at secondary schools level

The continual cycle of education reform movements suggests that there is a need for principals to evaluate and re-define their leadership roles on a continuous basis. The expanded expectations and responsibilities placed on schools have seemingly created a need for school leadership to be shared or distributed among teachers and principals. The purpose of this study was to find out the relationship between teacher empowerment and principal effectiveness in secondary schools of Islamabad. It was correlational study included the collection of quantitative data to obtain greater understanding and detail about the relationships between teacher empowerment and principal effectiveness as perceived by teachers. The population of the study was 458 Secondary School male teachers working in 45 secondary schools. The 229 Secondary School Teachers were taken as a sample by a random sampling technique which is 50% of the population. Two standardized instruments i.e. School Participant Empowerment Scale and Audit of Principal Effectiveness were used for collection of data on the study of two variables. Pearson r) Mean and Standard Deviation were used for data analysis. The findings of this study were showed significant relationships between Teacher Empowerment and Principal Effectiveness. It is concluded that the teacher’s empowerment in schools enhanced the effectiveness of the principals.


Introduction
Teacher empowerment has become gradually more observable within modern developments linked to educational top performance. The authorization of staff acts as an important aspect in the achievement of educational institutions, industries and further departments where a group of people is operating in the direction of a general objective. The happening of teacher empowerment corresponds to a significant component in extensive institution development endeavors of modern successful school society. Chamberlin (2008) expresses empowerment is a practice in where staff members possess deciding authority; approach toward funds, selection, sense of belief in members that they build a change, personality development and competency to operate. Teachers perform the central task in ensuring that student progress enhances each year because they have a command of classrooms of their school and the syllabus (Saravia-Shore, 2008). The teachers are competent to perform that task, but they require backup, encouragement and inspiration, which provided via principal of the school. It is noticeable that, teachers will generally be pleased with their workwhen a better connection found with their principal; they presented maximum outcomes and when they are also engaged in the school's managerial matters.
The strength of the association between teaching staff and head of school determines competency in improving lives of others, at the same time improving school effectiveness. Those principals who build empowerment in their teachers and also promote relationships with them that encourage shared esteem, mutual purpose, combined judgment, friendly associations also wish in favor of the progress comprise significance to the lives of others. Due to such affiliation, which is essential to teacher's opinion about the head of an institution having authority, it should be observed towards establishing a relationship among teaching staff; to provide empowerment. The teaching staff should be required to be extra involved inside institutions where the administrations of institutions are able to employ their headship ability to foster affairs along with empowering staff. The phenomenon of teacher empowerment has turned into enhancing attention stated by Scribner, Truell, Hager and Srichai (2001), through educational modification projects to stress better educator capability, participation and responsibility. So the study was focused to find out the relationship between teacher's perception of teacher empowerment and teacher's perception of principal effectiveness at secondary school level.

The Principal and School Improvement
McNulty (2005) explored to, through competency of headship within an institution be able to cover an impressive consequence lying on learner success. Those schools that needed considerable or meaningful development required selected managers who were dedicated toward understanding a reflection in achievement in favor of each learner, as well as devoted to making an authoritative headship group; allocating few tasks all the way through the headship group; choosing an accurate job; classifying sort of extent directed by means of a preferred job; also identify an administrative approach towards a sort of extent in the modification plan.
The transformational leadership has been set up on the way to confidently concerned by the innovative environment of schools (Moolenaar, Daly, &Sleegers, 2010). In addition to this approach, cover circuitous consequence lying on learner intellectual attainment (Koh, Steers, &Terborg, 2006). Leithwood and Sun (2012) recommended that transformational leadership generates most favorable occasions in favor of personality grooming during inspiration along with having an optimistic effect on an individual's talent to attain further and also do superior. At present, found only are the few headship performances which affect dedication, also the endeavor of organizers and supporters on the way to the attainment of managerial objectives, however, the standards and ambitions of both leader and supporter are improved by Appling these types of performances (Augspurger, 2014).

Principal Effectiveness
The research studies verified that the principal is a second essential institution-connected aspect during student success. In this way more research showed that teacher effectiveness exists on the other hand the few empirical research assessing principal effectiveness exists (Fuller & Hollingsworth, 2014). Current educational accountability modification has created much attention in the effectiveness of school leadership. However, principal effectiveness has been defined as the talent of the principal to influence changes in assessment scores of student (Fuller & Hollingsworth, 2014). On the other hand, the educationists in their research argued principal assessments should cover more than a change in assessment scores of students.
In the past, the principal's job relayed on public opinion and the actions of the highest achieving students (Lynch, 2012). On the other hand, stated by Fuller and Hollingsworth (2014), seeing that in recent times as in 2010, a small number of states had highly developed comprehensive assessment systems for school principals. In the past, central policymakers have not given proper significance to school leadership; on the other hand, numerous states have developed performance oriented assessment systems for school principals to suit the condition for releases from certain necessities of NCLB (Fuller & Hollingsworth, 2014).
The Center for American Progress (2011) stated that, the researchers and educationists are doing a lot of work to find out concerning the best measures of effective leadership and nextgeneration assessment systems. Even though there are plenty of best-known studies on teacher effectiveness, on the other way only a few practical research has observed the techniques of calculating principal effectiveness, mostly for evaluative reasons; the researchers and educationists basically assumed if teacher effectiveness could be estimated, afterward principal effectiveness could be estimated as well, regardless of the lack of research to authenticate like such statement (Fuller & Hollingsworth, 2014). The principalassessment procedure is an investigation into the addition to several containers labeled in favor of learner success information which include elements of assessing principal effectiveness survey, while the job of an instructional principal frequently point towards an emerging body of research classifying leadership as the second most important school centered element in student success (Miller, 2013). A challenger of that, however, argues that student success analysis information is not an official measure for principal assessment. Fuller and Hollingsworth (2014) to declare student assessment scores could offer an incorrect assessment of principal effectiveness for the reason that the assessments were not made for this specific principle and inconsistency in arrangement among assessments, core curriculum and what is trained may indicate that student learning is not precisely reflected in assessment scores. Furthermore, Piro et al. (2011) concern that too by using student achievement scores for principal assessment. The evaluator does not control for the lack of random sampling. The writers of the 2011 study, observe the significance of random sampling for generalization reasons and seeing as the majority student populations are made up of kids commencing the similar geographic region, in this manner a lot with alike income levels and cultural groups; generalizability of the outcome is not feasible. However, in this regard, several state assessment systems, encouraged by accountability process, in which selected student assessment scores as a component of the procedure for assessing leaders on the other way, an emerging investigation reveals that estimation management must focus resting on points that principals have further conduct power (Tredway, Stephens, Hedgspeth, Jimes & Rubio, 2012).
Whereas the school leadership does not show a direct impact on student assessment scores, Mendels (2012) retains the indirect workings of a principal encompass a major impact on student success in their school. Earlier period research had required to categorize performances and practices connected to enhancing student success. The researchers, Spiro (2013) and Mendels (2012), published a combined report in 2012 through The Wallace Foundation identified five key practices of effective principals. These are, determining an idea of achievement in support of learners, providing an environment friendly to learning, promoting management in staff, functioning among teachers to enhance their teaching, organizing group, the necessary data and procedures to encourage school progress. Meanwhile, organizations such as New Leaders and the University of California Berkeley's Leadership Connection have acknowledged further performances and practices which are shared with successful leaders (Southern Regional Education Board, 2009;New Leaders, 2012;Tredway et al., 2012). Another team of researchers, which belong to Vanderbilt University and the University of Pennsylvania, formed an opinion called Vanderbilt Assessment of Leadership in Education (VAL-ED). VAL-ED was extensively acknowledged as a fine and reliable assessment and places far better power than most other techniques on leadership behaviors identified to encourage and improve instruction (Mendels & Mitgang, 2013).

Methodology
This study was Quantitative in nature. It was a correlational research study to examine the relationship between teacher empowerment and principal effectiveness. Gall and Borg (2005) stated that Correlational research permits researchers to find out not only whether a relationship exists between variables, except also the strength of the relationship between them. The population was 458 Secondary School male Teachers working in 45 secondary schools.
The 229 Secondary School Teachers from 458 were taken as a sample by a simple random sampling technique which is 50% of the population. Two standardized instruments were used for data collection on the study variables. School Participant Empowerment Scale (SPES) developed by Short and Rinehart (1992)was used to evaluate teacher's empowerment which has 38-items consisting of six subscales and Audit of Principal Effectiveness (APE) was utilized to assess principal effectiveness. The Audit of Principal Effectiveness developed by Valentine and Bowman (1989) which has 80-items consisting of three domains (Organizational Development, Organizational Environment, and Educational Program). Pearson r was used to measure correlation. Pearson correlation coefficient 'r' value was calculated to find out the relationship between teacher empowerment and principal effectiveness. The higher value of correlation coefficient, r=.556 with a p-value of .000, shows the significant relationship at 0.01 level. Therefore, the null hypothesis making that, there is no significant correlation between teachers perceived empowerment scores and teacher perception of principal's effectiveness scores are rejected and the results of correlation (.556) showed that there is a significant relationship found between teacher empowerment and principal effectiveness scores.

Conclusions and Recommendations
From the findings of the study, it is concluded that teachers believed on the effectiveness of teacher empowerment in their schools. The teacher's empowerment in schools enhanced the effectiveness of the principals. The teacher empowerment and principal effectiveness are significantly correlated with each other. Therefore, a significant relationship is found between teacher empowerment and principal effectiveness. On the basis of conclusions, it is recommended that the principals of schools may provide self-efficacy to teachers, which improve teachers' performance. The principals of schools may appreciate their teachers' in decision-making matters of the school, e.g.; syllabus matters, teaching approaches, etc. The principals of schools may maintain helpful approach towards school responsibilities and teachers to develop their professional development. The principals of schools may provide autonomy regarding school matters. The principals of schools may provide the chances to their teachers to do something inspired and innovative.