Stepping Stones: Principal Career Paths and School Outcomes

Abstract

More than one out of every five principals leaves their school each year. In some cases, these career changes are driven by the choices of district leadership. In other cases, principals initiate the move, often demonstrating preferences to work in schools with higher achieving students from more advantaged socioeconomic backgrounds. Principals often use schools with many poor or low-achieving students as stepping stones to what they view as more desirable assignments. We use longitudinal data from one large urban school district to study the relationship between principal turnover and school outcomes. We find that principal turnover is, on average, detrimental to school performance. Frequent turnover of school leadership results in lower teacher retention and lower student achievement gains. Leadership changes are particularly harmful for high poverty schools, low-achieving schools, and schools with many inexperienced teachers. These schools not only suffer from high rates of principal turnover but are also unable to attract experienced successors. The negative effect of leadership changes can be mitigated when vacancies are filled by individuals with prior experience leading other schools. However, the majority of new principals in high poverty and low-performing schools lack prior leadership experience and leave when more attractive positions become available in other schools.

Relationship Between Systems Coaching and Problem-Solving Implementation Fidelity in a Response-to-Intervention Model

“…These data are consistent with the notion that the largest increase in problemsolving fidelity occurred during Year 1. The idea that coach continuity or a lack thereof may have some immediate impact on the implementation of an innovation is consistent with research that has shown that high principal and teacher turnover has a strong, negative effect on school improvement initiatives (Ronfeldt, Loeb, & Wyckoff, 2013) and that the strongest negative impact occurs immediately after the turnover (Béteille, Kalogrides, & Loeb, 2012). It is plausible that turnover in RTI coaches may have a similar effect on efforts to implement RTI.…”

Education Systems: Assignment, Admissions, Accountability and Autonomy

“…He finds statistically significant but quantitatively modest effects on attainment, probably insufficient to justify an expensive treatment. Béteille et al (2012) provide an overview of principals' career paths, and document substantial turnover rates: more than a 20 per cent annual separation rate for principals. A typical path is to use a low-attaining, disadvantaged school as a stepping-stone to a more preferred school.…”

The impact of pay satisfaction and school achievement on high school principals’ turnover intentions

“…For instance, Beteille et al (2012) found that increasing frequencies of principal turnover seems to have a negative impact on school achievement gains and is associated with increasing frequencies of teacher turnover, and those impacts are more pronounced for low achieving and high poverty schools. The authors also argue that frequent principal turnover may create inconsistency in schools, thereby negatively affecting any school improvement efforts.…”

“…This problem has been exacerbated by an increase in the frequency of principal departures from their positions (Beteille et al, 2012;Papa, 2007). Frequent principal turnover is troubling because the estimated time for substantive school reform requires about five to seven years (Fullan, 2001;Muscall and Leithwood, 2010) and repeated leadership turnover has been found to be negatively associated with student performance (Beteille et al, 2012). Consequently, principal turnover is gradually becoming a more important topic for scholarly research (Fink and Brayman, 2006).…”