Linkage between Teacher Autonomy and Public Primary School Pupils’ Academic Performance in Tanzania Local Government Authorities

Tanzania government has implemented many initiatives to promote pupils’ academic performance in primary schools for more than a decade. However, many school pupils in public primary schools still achieve low academic performance. The specific objective of this study was to examine the linkage between teacher autonomy and pupils’ academic performance. A survey was conducted in four Local Government Authorities (LGAs) which included Ngara, Kibondo, Tanga City and Mafinga Town. Sample size of the study was 354 teachers selected from ninety-five (95) public primary schools. Multi-stage with stratified simple random sampling was used to select the sample size while purposive sampling procedure was used to select 16 key informants including eight (8) head teachers and eight (8) standard seven pupils. Methods of data collection consisted of questionnaires, interviews and documentary review. Quantitative data were analysed using binary logistic regression while qualitative data were analysed thematically. Major findings showed that teacher autonomy model explained the variance on pupils’ academic performance by (0.09) which was too small while leaving 91% of variance to other factors outside teacher autonomy model. Furthermore, teacher autonomy had small odd ratio = (.51) and was significant (p < .001); which indicated that the odds of high teacher autonomy were (0.5) times more likely to achieve pupils’ academic performance compared to low teacher autonomy. Further findings also showed that teacher autonomy marginal effects were negative implying that one-unit change in teacher autonomy reduced the probability on pupils’ academic performance by (9%) and was significant (p < .001). Based on key informants, high autonomy made teachers to behave in a manner that affected the outcome variable. Thus, it was concluded that teacher autonomy affected pupils’ academic performance. The study recommended that educational stakeholders needed to implement teacher autonomy at minimum level.