PROJECT SCHOOLS AS A SCHOOL-BASED MANAGEMENT MODEL

Abstract

Education is a very expensive investment with high opportunity costs. Efforts for attainingschools with intended quality top the agenda of world nations’ education plans and programs.Turkish Ministry of National Education has also made several reforms to increase the qualityof education. The latest reform made in the field of educational management model has beenthe project schools developed with various innovations. Including school principals into theteachers’ selection process can be regarded as the new aspect of school-based management.Sharing authority to choose teachers with school principals is a brand new approach for theTurkish National Education system. This study aims to detect reflections of project schools’structural and managerial features in practice and depends on the qualitative method,including observation and interviewing techniques. The research sample comprises 15 ImamHatip High Schools located in Istanbul in 2018-2019 Education Year and 23 teachersworking in these schools. “Semi-structured Interview Questionnaire” was utilized for scaling.According to research results, we conclude that teachers in project schools are satisfied withthe new education model. There seems to be a total increase in teachers’ efficiency inaddition to higher teacher performances, due to the teams built under the leadership of schoolprincipals.