Abstract:
The main purpose of this study was to comparatively assess the implementation of instructional
leadership between government and non-government secondary schools in Bahir Dar City
Administration. To conduct this study, mixed methods research was employed for this study. Thus,
quantitative data were collected using questionnaires from teacher respondents, while qualitative
data was collected using interviews from academic vice principals, principals, and educational
supervisors. The related observation checklist was also used as secondary data sources. The data
were gathered from five governments and three non -government secondary schools that were
selected by simple random and purposive sampling technique. Accordingly, 222 teacher
respondents, 8 school principals, 8 academic vice principals, and 3 educational supervisors were
included in the samples to obtain the necessary data. SPSS version 23.0 was used to encode and
analyze the data. Descriptive statistics (frequency, per centage) and inferential statistics basically
independent sample t-test was used to analyze and interpret the gathered quantitative data. The
findings of the study revealed that the instructional leadership functions in non-government
secondary schools of Bahir Dar city Administration namely: framing the school’s goals,
communicating the school’s goals, supervising and evaluating the instruction, monitoring students’
progress, protecting instructional time, promoting professional development, maintaining high
visibility, providing incentives for teachers, and providing incentives for learning, were better
performances than those of government schools and statistically significant differences. Whereas,
among all ten challenges that affecting the instructional leadership implementation in government
and non-government schools were statistically significant difference except some aspects (3 of 10
challenges). As a result, the overall implementation of instructional leadership for quality teaching
and learning in non-government secondary schools were better than government secondary
schools. Based on the findings’, it is recommended that the government school principals should
have committed to give more emphasis to the teaching learning process by leaving the routine
administrative activities. The educational office heads of the city administration need to show their
professional commitment to improve the quality of school outcomes by devoting much of their time,
finance and material resource for the schools to severe shortage of budget and incentives needed
for teachers and learning students at both government and non-government schools. The Bahir Dar
City Administration Education Department should expand the private and charity schools than
government schools by considering the quality rather than quantity.