Author(s): Ahmed Mohamad
The concepts of leadership, management and administration overlap and have been accorded different emphases over time and in different contexts. Their usage varies across countries and professional cultures. In English-speaking countries such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the US, the role of leader is seen as of prime importance in raising standards and promoting school improvement, but this is not so in other countries, for example the Netherlands and Scandinavian countries. This difference in emphasis reflects variations in the functioning of education systems and their historical, national and regional policy contexts that will exert different degrees of influence on institutions’ work and therefore on the role of leaders in schools. The distinction between the focus or concerns of organisational leadership and management has been summarised as follows. This correlational cross-sectional study identifies and tests research-based constructs of school leadership and teacher job satisfaction on the 2012 Tell MASS survey using exploratory factor analyses, confirmatory factor analyses, and reliability analyses. Hierarchical linear modeling is used to examine the relationship between the survey’s school leadership and teacher job satisfaction scales. Multiple regression analyses are used to investigate the hypothesis that school leadership and student achievement on standardized tests in English Language Arts and Mathematics are also related, though this relationship is mediated by teacher job satisfaction.