Abstract:
The school improvement program, in the primary schools of Addis Ababa city administration was launched by the year 2007/2008. Regarding the preparation of the program, the educational leadership found in the town has provided an awareness creation programs to those key stakeholders and tried to avail the necessary human material and financial resources to the effective implementation of the program. As a result, a relatively adequate number of teachers were assigned to run the teaching and learning activities in the schools. However, there were in adequate and insufficient number of supportive staff to support the instructional process, insufficient provision of necessary educational materials and lack of budget. In general the primary schools were not well equipped to the reasonable level that they can implement SIP effectively. To sum up the preparation made by both the school leadership and JCEO was poor and not satisfactory. It is hardly possible to the primary schools to achieve the goals of SIP, unless such problems are aggressively acted up on. Before planning the school improvement plans, most schools were conducted a self-enquiry in order to determine their level of performance concerning the four domains of SIP. The self-enquiry was conducted using the national and local standards to analyze students' results. Using local standards as a basis to determine the performance level of schools might be deceiving to schools as it could not give them their real picture of performance in relation to other schools which were functioning the town as well as in the country. More over, the self- enquiry should be conducted in a continuous fashion (MoE;2002). This helps schools to revise their plan in relation to the newly existing situations as well as to re consider those issues that were over looked previously. However, in most primary schools of the town self-enquiry was carried out in irregular manner. As a result primary schools of the town were ill prepared in improving the academic performance of students as their self-enquiries were not only based largely on local standards but also they were conducted irregularly.
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