0.3 Cook, l. (october 2011). will a twenty percent salary bonus  (Page 7/9)

The faculty in the Department of Educational Administration concluded that we need to prepare more high quality principals who are capable and willing to take on the challenges of turning around low-performing schools. As a faculty, we must learn how to better assist our students in clarifying their attitudes toward working in low-performing schools, and we need to improve the way we explain the many positives that come from successful turnaround school challenges. To do these things we decided to first learn how PLCs feel about becoming a turnaround principal in low-performing building. Since bonuses for teachers and principals are being talked about more and more in newspaper and professional journal accounts of efforts to improve student achievement, the concept of including a bonus in exchange for at least a four-year commitment to a principalship in this type of building was included in the survey.

In total, PLCs in this second year of a longitudinal study were noncommittal when asked if they would make at least a four-year commitment to the principalship in a low-performing school, even if it included a 20% salary bonus. The mean score for the total group was 3.05, with 3.00 being the neutral rating—neither agree nor disagree—on the Likert scale. However, analyses of subsets from the sample, including ANOVA tests for interaction effects, provided several interesting exceptions to that neutral rating.

What could be some of the reasons why female PLCs already in a principal position, with 8-12 years of teaching experience prior to becoming a principal, are significantly more likely to accept the 20% incentive than females in the category of 0-7 years and 13+ years? Perhaps issues like these: (1) teaching long enough, compared to someone in the 0-7 category, to gain confidence that you know how to work successfully with kids, colleagues, and parents, (2) working with teachers, students, parents, and administrative colleagues long enough as a teacher and now as a principal to feel you can also be successful in a low-performing building, (3) not working so long as a teacher, compared to the teacher with 13+ years, that you stopped learning how to get better and just wanted something different, and (4) already realizing that, as a successful principal, you need a new and meaningful challenge—convinced you that with the 20% incentive and the motivations described above, you would look upon the principalship in a low-performing school not only as a challenge, but also as an opportunity to make things better, for students and all stakeholders.

Why would female PLCs in the same category as described in the first sentence in the paragraph above—already in a principal position and 8-12 years experience as a teacher—be significantly more likely to agree to the 20% incentive than men in that same category? Perhaps issues like these would be different for women and men: (1) some research says women have a greater empathy for students and teachers in low-performing schools, and, therefore, may have greater motivation to go into that kind of school environment and make things better for everyone, (2) men might feel more “beaten down” as the key disciplinarian in their current principalship than women, since women tend to take a more empathic approach to poor behavior from kids and teachers and less of a hard-nosed approach often associated with male principals; therefore, men may have less motivation to go to a building that may very well have more discipline problems, especially at the beginning of a new principalship in a low-performing building, (3) because of what some feel is a greater motivation to “get ahead” in the education profession by becoming a principal, men may have taken their current principalship to get away from teaching and now find the principal job is not what they really wanted; they certainly would not want to take a principalship in a low-performing school where the challenges will probably be even greater than those in their current position. These factors and in all likelihood other factors, too, could cause men to be less likely to accept the incentive.