Appraisal of Effectiveness of Public and Private Partnership Initiatives in the Management of Public Secondary Schools in North Central Nigeria

The study focused on the appraisal of the effectiveness of public and private partnership initiatives in the management of public secondary schools in North Central Nigeria. The study was guided by four research questions and four hypotheses. Survey research design was adopted for the study. The population of the study was 44,342 academic staff from 1,656 public secondary schools in North Central Nigeria. The sample for the study consisted of 396 respondents made up of 66 principals, 66 vice principal academic, 66 vice principal administration, 66 deans of studies and 132 class teachers in 66 selected public secondary schools that are spread in four states of Benue, Nasarawa, Kogi, Plateau and Federal Capital Territory Abuja in North Central Nigeria. The sampling technique used in this study was multi-stage sampling procedure. The instrument for data collection was a self-structured questionnaire. The instrument consisted of a 24-item questionnaire developed by the researchers. The items of the instrument were validated by four experts in the area of Educational Administration and Planning and one expert in the area of Measurement and Evaluation. The reliability coefficient of the instrument was established using Cronbach Alpha method. The reliability coefficient for the entire instrument was 0.89 which indicated that the instrument was reliable. The research questions posed in the study were descriptively answered using mean and standard deviation. The hypotheses formulated were tested at 0.05 level of significance using Chi-square test of goodness-of-fit statistic. The findings of the study indicated that public and private partnership initiatives have statistical significant positive effects on school management in the areas of funding, provision of facilities, instructional supervision with effect size statistic of 42.9%, 38.7% and 56.0% respectively but, have no statistical significant positive effect in the areas of staff development in public secondary schools in North Central Nigeria. Based on these results, it was recommended that there should be a continuous encouragement on the part of stakeholders in education for active private intervention in the areas of funding, provision of facilities, instructional supervision, with more emphasis on staff development.