Bother?<http://www.nais.org/about/article.cfm?ItemNumber=3D152810&sn.ItemNu=
mber=3D4181&tn.ItemNumber=3D147271>
*, he discusses school leadership and Dan Pink's ideas about motivation.
He ends his post with the following question.
"So, if Pink is right about the prime motivators, and I=92m right about our
schools cultures being the natural environment to cultivate and accelerate
those motivators, why is it that we don=92t see leadership more easily and
more often effecting change?"
Now Pat is a pretty smart guy, so one has to wonder if this isn't a
rhetorical question. I suspect he has his own ideas about why our school
leadership has become so risk averse.
I have my own opinion, which curiously, is also based on Pink's recent work=
.
In Pat's blog post he let slip that headmaster salaries have become
"increasingly competitive". I'll say they have! In a recent post to ISED I
shared the following data from NAIS reports.
The median salary of Heads, with inflation adjustment, increased 31.4%
between 1999-2009. During the same period the median salary of teachers,
with inflation adjustment, increased 5.8%.
Pink provides example after example in his book that extrinsic rewards are
very dangerous and often lead to highly perverse results. If you need more
than Pink's examples witness the near meltdown of the global economy brough=
t
about by some of the most highly paid people in the world.
In a recent interview<http://www.publicschoolinsights.org/carrots-and-stick=
s-are-so-last-century-conversation-author-dan-pink>Pink
noted:
"What the science shows is that these what I call =93if then=94 rewards=97=
=93if you
do this, then you get that=94=97could have a devastating effect on creativi=
ty
because they narrow our vision, rather than broaden it, which you need for
creative thinking. They can inspire people to think short term rather than
long term. They can cause some people to act unethically and take shortcuts=
.
And they can extinguish intrinsic motivation."
I believe Pink's work is clearly pointing at excessive headmaster
compensation as very likely being the answer to Pat's question.
There is an easy way to test this hypothesis. Headmasters could give
themselves a 25% salary cut this year (bringing them back into line with
recent salary increases of teachers) and we can all watch and see if we hav=
e
a little bit more creativity from our leaders next year.
--=20
Fred Bartels
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