School leaders have a lot to be stressed about. As middle managers, principals must implement sweeping policy mandates or curriculum changes while making sure their schools are running smoothly and teachers aren’t burning out. Budgetary concerns, political pressures, and backlash from the community can make their jobs harder.
All these factors induce stress. But facing pressures that spill over from the workday to the home can predict the onset of mental health challenges, like anxiety and depression, in principals, according to a newly published study.
Principals often bring work home and answer emails or calls after school hours, since many say they don’t have enough time during the work day to complete all their tasks.
“Then, there’s emotional baggage that comes from leading schools and working with children and teachers,” said Eleanor Su-Keene, one of the co-authors of the study and an assistant professor of teaching, learning, and culture at Texas A&M University. “Your teachers are not doing well. You don’t have the resources to support them. Kids come to school hungry. You are working with [child protective services] all the time. That kind of emotional stuff also takes a toll.”
A third of the 119 principals who responded to the survey said their stress emerges from the diminishing boundary between their work and home life. Sixty-one percent said their stress comes from student- and teacher-related issues, and about 3 in 10 said it comes from dealing with parents.
External factors like district demands, accountability pressures, and inadequate funding also add to their stress levels, the study found.
It’s important for district and state-level leaders to focus on the factors that lead to stress, anxiety, and depression in principals, said Su-Keene. Districts need to “alleviate phantom tasks”—duties without a clear purpose—to determine what’s necessary for principals and teachers to do to improve student learning.
Putting less on a principal’s plate can be a short-term measure to reduce their stress because systemic issues like inadequate staffing or funding will take much longer to resolve, Su-Keene added.
Education Week spoke to Su-Keene about her latest research and ideas for how to improve principals’ working conditions to reduce their stress. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What does your latest paper add to the research on how work-related stress affects principals?
Most of my work has focused on interdisciplinary work to examine principals’ well-being and their health. I’ve studied their poor quality of sleep and their mental health and how that affects their practice, confidence levels, and leadership.
In social science, there’s this very classic theory called Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems Theory, which identifies spheres of influence around an individual. I use this theory, this ecological system, to think about where principal stressors originate in these spheres.
Apart from stress in school and external district-level pressures, the one thing that I think was really missing, which we know a lot about, is a principal’s work spilling into their home. It comes from not having the amount of time that they need in a day to complete the additional tasks that it takes to run a school. These can be tangible things like bringing work home, checking emails, and phone calls.
But then there is also the emotional baggage that comes from leading schools and working with children and teachers. That kind of emotional stuff also takes a toll.
Those two things exist at the intersection of work and home. We added this layer.
How does this new layer of stress impact principals?
School-based stressors are not having the same impact on mental health issues in principals, like anxiety and depression. It’s only that layer where work is spilling into their personal life that is having the most impact [on anxiety and depression].
It’s important to separate that stress is different from mental health. They are correlated, but mental health is really a consequence of chronic stress. And we know from so much literature that chronic stress increases your risk for anxiety and depression.
The only thing that predicted mental health was that inner sphere, that work spillage. The work that was being taken home, the emails that were being answered at home, the emotional demands that were compounding their mental health symptoms.
And that’s not to say that every individual principal who’s stressed is going to have anxiety and depression. It just means that the higher the stress, the more likely, and the higher risk they have for anxiety and depression.
How can districts systematically tackle this problem?
There are two ways we can tackle this. We can take a bottom-up approach, which is to train and support principals and aspiring principals to navigate that spillage.
I’m working with our local school district [in College Station] on a project called Thriving Teachers and Leaders, Texas, where we develop these professional learning opportunities and offer them to teachers and leaders to support their well-being and manage stress. What we emphasize are practices that are embedded within their workday. We don’t want them to take an hour out of their day to go to yoga, because they probably don’t have that time.
The other conversation is what can districts do to figure out how to alleviate phantom tasks. Principals are being asked to do things that are irrelevant, and for what purpose? Are the initiatives that districts roll out important, or are they just compliance?
Can these data about principals’ mental health shift attitudes at the state or federal level?
When I use [principals’] health data, I can say to policymakers that this isn’t just what principals say. These are hard, objective data points on what’s going on with their lives, and it doesn’t let them lead their schools well.
We’ve just written a grant to do some cortisol measurements in hair and in fingernails to look at the cortisol profiles of our [school] leaders and then compare that to the national population.
It’s taking a while for society to understand that if we want our children to learn well, we need the adults in that building—teachers and leaders—to be well.
