Schools face numerous pressing challenges, from chronic absenteeism and falling grades to more structural problems like retaining teachers and workforce development. District and state-level leaders have approached these problems separately, but often they neglect the most strategic lever in the education system: principals.
Effective principals, in both high- and low-performing schools, play a critical role in retaining teachers, improving students’ academic outcomes, and maintaining a positive school culture, according to a new report by the Learning Policy Institute, a California-based research organization and think tank. Released in May, the report, titled “The Principal Effect: How Investing in School Leaders Is Key to Solving Education’s Challenges,” synthesizes several studies on principal effectiveness and school performance.
Principals are responsible for creating the conditions that help students and teachers thrive. Effective principals include teachers in setting academic goals, provide coaching, and foster collaboration, which are linked to improvements in students’ grades, the report notes. This creates a fortuitous cycle: better grades and working conditions retain teachers for longer and bring stability and continuity that positively impact students.
The report highlights a new connection between teacher effectiveness and parent engagement, said Linda Darling-Hammond, a lead author on the report and the chief knowledge officer of the Learning Policy Institute. Darling-Hammond has decades-long experience in education policy reform and oversaw changes to teacher licensure and credentialing as the chair of the California Commission of Teacher Credentialing. One study also showed that parent trust in a school was “highly correlated” with teachers feeling like they had opportunities to collaborate, said Darling-Hammond.
“I read [the study] two or three times and thought they were talking about teacher collaboration, but they’re talking about family engagement. Wait a minute, they’re talking about both.”
Education Week spoke to Darling-Hammond about why principal investment remains overlooked, and what states can do differently.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
We’ve had research for a while recommending the use of principals to improve schools. Why hasn’t that translated into policy?
There are a couple of states that have made some useful investments. I would still say that there’s [too little] attention to the importance of training and preparing principals and recruiting and retaining them. We’ve made very little investment overall compared to some other countries that I’ve studied, where they really understand the importance of the leadership pipeline.
One of the places I think of, because it’s so well organized, is Singapore... They have created a leadership-development system where every teacher can go up a career ladder to either become a master teacher or go on a leadership track, and the training for educators is funded by the government. There’s a lot of mentoring and coaching that’s all built into the system.
In the U.S., we throw money down the drain to spend a lot more to patch up the results of not having done it right the first time. If you don’t invest in [a] well-prepared teaching and leadership workforce, you will have fewer kids who succeed. You will have to spend more on summer school, on retention, and down the road, on the criminal justice system. Not making the obvious investments on the front end ends up costing us a lot later on in ways that are much less productive. This thought process needs to be embedded in our policy making.
You mentioned some states are trying to amend that. What’s a good example?
We’re doing another study where we’re looking at places that have principal-development programs that are well developed. One state that we’re looking at is Delaware. They have the Delaware Academy for School Leadership. It’s a small state with lots of small districts, and so they support the districts in both recruiting and training and then developing mentoring and coaching.
Chicago [public schools] has a division of principal quality in the central office. [It helps] recruit principals and support them in getting a full year internship under the wing of an expert principal because the job of teaching and the job of leading [are] very different.
But for any principal-development programs, people have to do it on their own dime and find a way to bring in an income while they’re training for the principalship. Often, those programs just ask teachers to imagine what it would be like to be [a] principal, but that’s much less powerful. We found in our report that people who have a full-year internship under an expert principal end up having much stronger impacts on both teacher retention and student achievement because they’ve just learned so much more.
Most states have a principal development program or on-the-job mentorship. Is it a quality issue?
The availability of the training matters, and states need principal-preparation programs on the front end that have this kind of wrap-around internship. You need programs throughout the career that have not only workshops and opportunities to come together and learn something, but [also] the continuity of a coaching structure that allows people to learn how to apply [their training]. We do have good examples. We just don’t have them on a sustained basis in most places.
We also know that the way you learn matters. It’s not just what you learn. We just did a survey of principals across the country, and the most desired professional development that they’re asking for is in [artificial intelligence]. But it’s both the availability of the content that they feel they need, and then the way in which it’s learned, which usually needs to be a combination of didactic experience, learning about something, but then also applying it with support and coaching. When those pieces come together, you see dramatically better outcomes.
The report focuses on how effective principals promote teacher collaboration. Is there a way for school leaders to train for that kind of instructional leadership?
Where [aspiring principals] train should be in schools where there is a structure for teacher collaboration. They also need to understand that the way you design time and opportunities in a school schedule is a principal’s responsibility, and that they can organize a schedule that has teacher collaboration built into it. There are lots of ways to do it, but some people have never seen it and don’t know how. It’s a different model of school design that principals need to know about.
Principals also need to know how to support teachers in collaborating effectively. How do you develop a shared vision that everyone contributes to, and then how do you implement that in a way that keeps people returning to the vision? If you have a vision about a way in which literacy will permeate the school, teachers need to think together about which practices work and [make] decisions about how they want to implement them across the school in a coherent way.
When people are working together towards a shared vision, when they have the time and opportunity and support for collaboration, it becomes a better place to work. When teachers get moral and pedagogical support from their leaders, they are more likely to want to stay.
