According to a just released national survey, teachers want supportive leadership more than anything else. In fact, by a wide margin, teachers indicated that supportive leadership was more important than higher salaries and pay for performance.

The survey of 40,000 teachers was sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in collaboration with Scholastic, Inc. "We wanted to put teachers' voices front and center in the debate around education reform," said Vicki Phillips, the Gates Foundation's education director. "Teachers are on the front line of this work every day ... it doesn't make sense not to be talking to teachers."

What do teachers want?

- Supportive leadership (68%) more than higher salaries (45%)

- Digital media more than textbooks

- Evaluations based on how much students learn more than on principal evaluations. Only 22% believe that principal evaluations accurately represent their work.

- Salaries more than performance pay.

- The current school year over a longer school day and year. Only 36% favor extending the school year.

Additional findings of the survey include:

- 97% believe that setting high expectations is essential in raising student achievement

- 8% indicated that performance pay was essential.

- 71% believe that monetary rewards will have little or no impact on student achievement

- Also high on the list of essentials were relevant professional development, clean and safe working conditions, time to collaborate, and access to high-quality curriculum.

Conclusions

School leadership is essential to establishing a school climate in which teachers can teach and students can learn. As far as teachers are concerned, the principal is literally the “cork in the bottle.” The principal either makes things happen or prevents them from happening.

If schools want great teachers, they are going to have to have great leaders to support them.

All the money spent on improving teacher training will go for naught if we don’t fund principal development.

It is interesting to note that none of the things that teachers want most--respect, support, clean, safe, and orderly schools—cost anything. The most important things in school really are free. Money cannot buy a culture. Nor, can money buy relationships, trust, or support. School culture is not for sale!

Teachers know what they want, and when they don’t get it, they vote with their feet. They leave the school or they leave the profession. Teachers will simply not work in a school that is not teacher-friendly, and why should they?