Effectiveness of Public Secondary Schools: Exploring Distributive Leadership and Teacher Autonomy in Northwest Nigeria

Studies have conceptualized distributive leadership based on the school improvement model—whereby distributive leadership, decentralization, and teacher autonomy result in school improvement. Similarly, scholars argued that this practice tends to be an objective worth emulating. Consequently, this article examines the practice of distributive leadership, teacher autonomy, and school effectiveness in a decentralized context, in northwest Nigeria. Adopting the quantitative method, this descriptive survey analyzed a sample of 310 teachers. The paper found that both coherent leadership and support and supervision exert a significant direct effect on curriculum autonomy (β = 0.19, p < .05; β = 0.31, p < .05) and general autonomy (β = 0.31, p < .05; β = 0.31, p < .05), respectively. While contributing to the demand for more literature from emerging and nonapparent research contexts, this study explained that policies that work well in one country may not be implemented and/or yield similar outcomes across national borders.