| The purpose of this study is to construct a framework of management approaches for the pursuance of school quality in the context of primary schools in Hong Kong. The framework comprises a model of school education quality which contains five dimensions, and four management approaches. In the literature review, the conceptualization of school education quality is based upon research on organizational effectiveness (Cameron & Whetten, 1983) and school effectiveness (Cheng, 1990, 1996; Cheng & Tam, 1997), that there are five dimensions to school education quality, namely, quality in goal achievement, quality in satisfaction, quality in smooth process, quality in problem prevention, quality in continuous learning. The conceptualization of management approaches is based upon the multiple perspectives of organization proposed by Sergiovanni (1984), Bush (1986), Bolman and Deal (1991), and Cheng (1997), that school organization can be perceived from four perspectives, namely, structural, human resource, political, and cultural. Finally, teacher performance measures such as teaching efficacy and teaching commitment, student performance measures such as lean-ling attitude, learning efficacy, and self concept have been employed to test the authenticity of the present framework.;In the multi-level analysis of teacher performance, it was found that quality in continuous learning contributed to the prediction of teacher efficacy, and all five dimensions of school education quality contributed to the prediction of teacher commitment. Moreover, human strength, political strength, and cultural strength contributed to the prediction of teacher commitment. Multi-level analysis of student performance revealed that quality in satisfaction contributed to the prediction of the attibution to success component of learning efficacy, quality in satisfaction interacts with gender contributed to the prediction of personal learning efficacy and the combined learning efficacy. Moreover, political strength contributed to the prediction of self-concept towards peer. Also, there were main effects, some interaction, and some effects in the random part of the model. This shows that the contributions of school education quality and management strengths to teacher and student performance are complicated and subtle.;The above findings did confirm the close relation between management strengths and the quality dimensions, and supported the claim that both the quality dimensions and management strengths were valid predictors of teacher and student performance. The results also implied that schools should adopt the management approaches in order to improve school education quality.;In-depth case study of three outlier schools revealed that the four management approaches did contribute to the five dimensions of school education quality. It also revealed that the exertion of management strengths might not be the only factor which brings about school quality. It was discovered that the contextual factors of the school, such as the existence of implicit goals, ethos of the school in the community, experience of the senior teachers, etc., had all played important roles in enabling a school to achieve school quality. (Abstract shortened by UMI.). |
