Leadership competence and the role of cultural practices in relation to the effectiveness of schools

iNTRODUCTIONInitial decision to work on school effectiveness (SE) evoked many questions in mind. Isschool effectiveness synonymous to effective schooling, quality school, and school excellenceetc.? With enormous literature, why do schools still struggle to be effective? What are the crucial factors contributing to it? Why the levels of teaching and learning are so deplorable inmanygovernment schools? What should be the basic measures of SE? How can we say that this school is good and this is not? What one may count in the defining frame of effective schools? What arethose practices, which make school performance better? Wyatt (1996) emphasized that after theresearch of more than two decades into SE, it is important to question what we have learnt andachieved till so far. Ralph and Fennessy's (1983) asserted that much of the literature takes theform of review of reviews, with only a small number of highly influential empirical studiesproviding the 'evidence' cited in paper after paper (in Wyatt, 1996). The growing interest in effective schools has produced a great amount of literaturedescribing the key features, however, the conceptualization of this concept is still complex. Cameron and Whetten (1983) argued that the defining features, criteria and modelsoforganizational effectiveness are diverse in nature. Thus, a single clear definition is not feasible. Organizations may have multiple goals at different levels, which may contradict each other. Acloser look depicts that all schools are unique in their own ways, and many factors combinetomake them what they are. In such a condition, stating that all schools work on a set patternandfabricated with specific factors is neither easy nor correct. However, it is possible to identifyaset of common characteristics like school culture, leadership, teachers' trust in head teacher ortheir own colleagues etc. (Uline, Miller & Tschannen-Moran, 1998) that may contribute totheeffectiveness of school. Literature suggests that different school of thoughts/disciplines have conceptualizedSEin different ways. Per say, educationists have given more importance to the input aspects likeenrollment, retention, and dropout rates (Kochan, Tashakkori, &Teddlie, 1996), whereas manyhave viewed it in terms of students' performance, academic achievement or success rate, theoutput aspect (Coleman et al., 1966; Mott, 1972). Among the different measures of SE, student achievement has been operationalized in terms of standardized scores of students in reading,