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Abstract

The Collaborative Project (CP) began as a pilot project in five North Carolina school districts in 2007 featuring a performance incentive initiative for teachers and administrators. The objective of this study was to document principals’ perceptions of the performance incentive initiative to determine challenges encountered during implementation. The researcher used a qualitative interview process to collect data from participating principals employed in the CP districts. The principals’ responses were analyzed and tables were constructed to show the responses for each question. For triangulation purposes, the results were compared with survey data from a 2009 evaluation completed by the Carolina Institute for Public Policy. Overall, the majority of principals interviewed believed that some components of the teacher performance incentive criteria helped their schools. The interview process revealed some unanticipated results not mentioned in the literature review and the results of the study provided insight into anomalies encountered during implementation.

Keywords

collaborative project teacher performance incentives educational leadership

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