The Relationship Between Teacher Empowerment in Decision Making, and Teachers Professional Intentions, Teacher Satisfaction, and Student Achievement

The purpose of this study ws to examine the relationships between educators\u27 perceived empowerment with respect to making decisions about pedagogical and administrative issues and three outcomes related to school productivity-teacher retention, teacher satisfaction, and student proficiency in basic skills. To answer the study\u27s three research questions, a secondary analysis that applied hierarchical multiple regression to an existing dataset was undertaken. The dataset in question combined information from the 2013 administration of the Teaching, Empowering, Leading, and Learning (TELL) survey in over 1,400 Tennessee schools with concurrent school demographic and student achievement data archived on the Tennessee Department of Education (TDOE) website. The results of the analyses revealed that teacher empowerment, especially teacher pedagogical empowerment, is associated both statistically and substantively with teacher retention. Controlling for demographic characteristics of students, faculty, and the institutions themselves, teacher administrative and pedgagogical empowerment explained about 15% of the variance in the percent of teachers\u27 intending to remain at their present schools. Conversely, both types of empowerment were found to limit the impact of teachers\u27 planning to move to a different school or school district, or to leave the classroom entirely. A robust association was also observed between teacher empowerment and a view of the school as overall, a good place to work and learn. However, once student background variables had been taken into account, connections between teacher empowerment and higher levels of student proficiency were slight at both elementary and secondary schools. For both types of schools, only administrative teacher empowerment was linked to higher levels of student proficiency in reading and mathematics at the lower grades and in algebra and English at the upper grades. In these analyses, the proportion of variance explained in these outcomes ranged between two and three percent, denoting a mostly indirect effect of empowerment on student learning