The main purpose of this research is to establish an assessment of the implementation of school improvement program: a comparative study between government and private secondary schools of Ethiopia in Bahir Dar city administration. In the city administration there are a total of 17 secondary schools of which 11 schools is public and the rest 6 are private owned. Based on proximity, this study purposively took 3 public and 2 private secondary schools. Simple random sampling technique was also used to obtain 85 students from grade 10^th of the entire population. Out of 85 samples, 56 respondents were taken from government schools and the rest 29 were taken from private schools. Principals, teachers, educational experts and Parent Student Teacher Association (PSTA) were selected by purposive sampling technique. The instruments used for data collection were questionnaire, semi structured-interview and document analysis. The documents included school improvement policies, strategies and practices; with particular reference to recent updated in SIP. This instrument used for analyzing the SIP implementation from inspection checklist, GEQIP reports, and other related publications. The validity analysis of the respondent was done on selected respondents that can be representative of the sample population and also are in a professional level. The respondents of the pilot study have pointed out the shortages of the original data collection instrument by rendering critical suggestions, which are incorporated by revising the survey questionnaire and the calculated Cronbach Alpha for the five Likert-scale items was found to be 0.86 which indicated the reliability of the instrument. The study adopted quantitative and qualitative methodology with a descriptive research design in a comparative perspective.

The present study found out that learning environment domain is the top most implemented domain in government and private schools; while, leadership and management domain is the least implemented domain in both government and private schools. There is significance difference with the implementation of learning environment and community involvement domain between government and private schools. While, there is no significance difference in the implementation of leadership and management domain and teaching and learning domain between government and private schools. It was recommended that, government should play the leading roles to create conducive environment to undertake challenges in the implementation of SIP, providing workshops, seminars and training to orient and train all stakeholders, appointment of school principals should be better if it is done based on merits, let school principals to work at one school for some academic years in able to attain consistency of the program implementation.