An investigation of elementary teachers\u27 and principals\u27 perceptions of teacher working conditions and academic achievement in North Carolina

The purpose of this study was to investigate elementary teachers\u27 and principals\u27 perceptions of working conditions and academic achievement in selected regions in North Carolina public schools. The participants in this study were North Carolina principals and elementary teachers from the north and south central school regions. These educators participated in the 2006 North Carolina Teacher Working Conditions Survey giving their perceptions of working conditions in their schools. The researcher selected the North Carolina Teacher Working Conditions Survey which provided pre-existing data that was analyzed based on 30 working conditions standards within five domains: (a) time (b) leadership (c) empowerment (d) professional development, and (e) facilities and resources. The survey addressed their perceptions of how they felt the actual conditions were at their school level using a Likert type scale of 1 to 5, with 1 representing the lowest and 5 representing the highest possible average. In order to have valid school level reports, the participating school district were required to have a minimum of 40% teacher response rate. The findings suggested that principals agreed more strongly about the satisfaction of working conditions when compared to the responses of teachers. The Levene\u27s tests were all significant with equal variances not assumed. All differences between teachers and principals on the scales were statistically significant. The principals had higher scale scores than teachers in all five teachers working conditions domains. The Annual Yearly Progress (AYP) measures were significantly related to the responses given by teachers when correlated with each working condition domain. Consequently, there was a slight relationship, but not strong enough to make a significant difference. The researcher suggested that future research be conducted to include a wider geographic area to determine the relationship between job satisfaction and teacher retention, as indicated by the significance of the means of every domain