The Principal Effect: How Investing in School Leaders Is Key to Solving Education’s Challenges

Public schools are facing a major set of challenges, including concerns about students’ mental health, chronic absenteeism, learning loss, high teacher attrition rates, and teacher shortages. Often policymakers, funders, leaders of education improvement efforts, and other stakeholders treat these challenges separately, developing different strategies to address each one. This fragmented approach, however, overlooks the one factor that influences all school conditions: the school principal.

By virtue of their role, principals influence the experiences of every person in the school and thus play a key role in improving student and teacher outcomes. Strengthening and investing in school leadership is also an equity strategy, given that effective principals have even larger effects in schools serving students from historically underserved communities. This report, which summarizes existing research about principals’ effects, explains the importance of investing in and leveraging school leadership for mitigating the challenges currently facing schools.

How Principals Improve Education Outcomes

Principals affect student and teacher outcomes in three major ways:

1. Supporting effective instruction
2. Retaining teachers, thereby strengthening school stability and expertise
3. Creating a positive climate that welcomes and connects staff, students, and families

Researchers agree that principals’ effects on student academic outcomes come about, for the most part, through their support for teachers and their practices. This occurs as principals orchestrate teacher professional development, productive teacher assignments, opportunities for teacher collaboration, professional culture, improvement-focused feedback, and the working conditions that teachers experience within a school. Actions that help teachers improve instruction within and across classrooms increase their experience of collegiality, their ability to engage in collective problem-solving, and their sense of efficacy, all of which matter for student achievement and teacher retention.

Effective principals support strong instruction, which improves student learning. A large body of research has identified strong links between principals’ instructional leadership practices and improved student outcomes. Principals play a major role in supporting strong instruction, and consequently student learning, by:

• engaging with teachers around instruction: enabling successful practices, observing, coaching, providing feedback, and reviewing data together;
• working with staff to develop a cohesive educational program with strong curriculum and shared practices;
• investing in high-quality staff development;
• enabling teacher collaboration for planning and professional learning; and
• developing shared instructional leadership and shared decision-making.

Effective principals retain teachers, which improves school stability and student outcomes. Principal support of collaboration and orchestration of a shared vision are also significantly positively related to teacher retention, which further supports school stability and student achievement. Teachers who rate their principals as effective and supportive are less likely to leave their schools, and this impact is largest in high-need schools. Therefore, building leadership capacity can be a high-leverage strategy for achieving greater equity across schools. Specific principal actions that are positively related to teacher retention include:

• developing a safe, nurturing environment that supports well-being and fosters belonging of students and staff;
• supporting teachers at all experience levels with resources and caring;
• buffering teachers from external demands while protecting their time and agency; and
• fostering teacher collaboration and involvement in decision-making.

Effective principals create a positive climate, which improves student belonging, attendance, and achievement, as well as teacher retention. As leaders of schools, principals play a key role in shaping the school climate, which shapes the ways in which adults and students interact with and relate to one another. A substantial body of research shows that a positive school climate in which students feel a strong sense of belonging and support improves student attendance, behaviors, graduation rates, and learning loss. Studies show that positive school climates reduce the negative effects of poverty on achievement—effectively boosting grades, test scores, and student engagement. Creating such an environment involves structuring supports for both teachers and students, as well as reaching out to families, as students’ willingness to attend school is related not only to their relationships with teachers, but also to the involvement of their parents. Principals enable a positive school climate by:

• adopting policies and practices that undergird positive teacher–student relationships characterized by warmth, acceptance, and support;
• building a welcoming, inclusive, communicative school culture that builds trust between students, teachers, and families;
• creating structures and expectations for engaging families regularly;
• establishing high expectations for student learning for both teachers and students; and
• employing democratic school principles such as shared decision-making.

Thus, investments in principals’ knowledge, skills, and capacity must be part of any improvement strategy, particularly in schools facing the largest challenges.

The Importance of Supporting and Retaining Principals

Principal retention is consistently found to be associated with greater teacher stability and student achievement. In general, principal turnover is associated with declines in student test scores, which are larger in high-poverty schools and when the incoming principal is inexperienced. Principal turnover is also associated with decreased teacher ratings of school climate and higher teacher turnover, which are correlated with declines in student achievement. Principal turnover is typically higher in schools that serve concentrations of students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. Principal turnover is also higher in schools with fewer resources, less qualified teachers, and less central office support, and where there are fewer principal learning opportunities, including lower-quality principal preparation and fewer opportunities for coaching and networking.

Fortunately, we know a great deal about what enables principals to become more effective and stay in the profession. Research has found that quality learning opportunities in both preservice preparation and ongoing professional development enable principals to learn and implement the practices that make a difference both for student learning and for teacher learning and retention.

Policy Implications

Tackling the issues facing public schools today—from chronic absenteeism and lagging achievement to staff shortages—requires more than a piecemeal approach to solving individual problems. Because principals influence all of these problems for better or for worse, preparing and supporting principals so they are best equipped to handle them is one of the best investments policymakers can make. Further, because principal turnover undermines both teacher retention and student achievement, addressing it through coherent, evidence-based leadership policies represents one of the most powerful strategies for improving school quality and achieving greater equity.

In addition to providing adequate and equitable resources for schools, research suggests that districts, states, and the federal government can do the following:

• Ensure high-quality principal preparation. States’ strategic use of licensure and program approval standards can help ensure that principal training includes the features of high-quality programs and content focused on critical areas of principal practice (e.g., leading instruction, shaping a positive school culture, developing people, and meeting the needs of diverse learners). States can also use standards to emphasize the types of learning opportunities that matter for effectiveness, such as quality internships, applied learning, and coaching and mentoring under the auspices of an experienced principal.
   
• Create strategies to underwrite the cost of strong preparation. States and districts can provide funding to cover the cost of high-quality preparation programs, especially by supporting yearlong internships linked to supportive coursework under the wing of a veteran principal. Well-designed internships are strongly related to principals’ later effectiveness. Such investments are typically paid back in service and may be offered in exchange for a commitment to serve in a priority school. Investments in paid internships or apprenticeships for leadership preparation can encourage high-quality candidates to enter school leadership roles with a better-developed skill set and without going into debt.
   
• Invest strategically in principals’ professional learning. Districts, states, and the federal government can invest strategically in high-quality professional learning—ensuring that principals have plentiful and equitable opportunities to learn how to support instruction and create collegial workplaces that improve teaching effectiveness and teacher retention. The form of professional learning also matters: Principals identify coaching and mentoring, networks that work on shared problems, and opportunities for self-directed learning that is tightly connected to their work as extremely important.
   
• Build robust pipelines for recruiting and preparing equity-focused school principals, along with coherent systems of development and succession. Districts can launch (and states can support) pipeline programs that recruit teachers who have demonstrated strong teaching and leadership capacity and carry them through preparation and induction; then organize ongoing learning for leaders, using standards that bring a coherent vision to the entire career. Pipelines not only improve the practice of individuals and create a supply of qualified leaders for school and district positions, but they also contribute to districtwide practices that support systemic change and increase student learning and equity.
   
• Attend to principals’ working and learning conditions. Central office policies should attend to principals’ needs and concerns, which may require increased information gathered from principals and principal input on district decisions that impact schools. This responsiveness should include strategies to keep effective principals, providing needed school resources and flexibility. States can conduct working conditions surveys for principals, as many do for teachers, and use data to inform policy decisions that address both statewide needs and those of the neediest districts and regions where principal turnover is usually highest.
   
• Support adequate and equitable principal compensation. District and state leaders can review the competitiveness of salaries and consider other forms of compensation (such as student loan repayment or housing supports) that may be important to attract and retain principals. States also have the responsibility of ensuring that school funding is adequate and equitable across communities, targeting additional funds to the neediest districts and schools. This can help districts provide more adequate compensation and better working conditions in the communities where these are most needed.
   
• Establish principal stability as a goal, and create productive mechanisms for principal feedback, evaluation, and mentoring. Districts that support, develop, and mentor principals can reduce the likelihood of principal attrition. District leaders can examine the usefulness of their principal support and evaluation systems, gathering input from principals as well as others in the district and community, with an eye toward sustaining practices that are helpful in guiding principals’ development and supporting their effectiveness.

Policies that support evidence-based approaches to principal preparation and professional learning throughout their careers can make a measurable difference in addressing today’s most critical issues, such as chronic absenteeism, learning recovery, and teacher retention, in a coherent way.

The Principal Effect: How Investing in School Leaders Is Key to Solving Education’s Challenges by Linda Darling-Hammond, Julie Fitz, María Virginia Giani, Molly F. Gordon, and Marjorie Wechsler is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

This research was supported by The Wallace Foundation. Core operating support for LPI is provided by the Heising-Simons Foundation, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Raikes Foundation, Sandler Foundation, Skyline Foundation, and MacKenzie Scott. We are grateful to them for their generous support. The ideas voiced here are those of the authors and not those of our funders.