POLICY BRIEF DEC 2025 - State Level Efforts to Support School Leaders - Recruitment and Professional Development

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by Kyle

POLICY BRIEF DEC 2025 examines how state-level policy can strengthen school leadership to improve student achievement and address principal shortages. It synthesizes evidence that effective principals raise learning outcomes and influence school culture, while teacher stress reflects leadership-related challenges like limited decision-making and unattainable goals. The brief links principal attrition to factors including inadequate preparation, working conditions, salaries, and accountability perceptions, then outlines two priority areas: recruitment into leadership and professional development strategies to improve pipelines and retention.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages8

Reading Time20 min

AccessFree to download

State Level Efforts to Support School Leaders

Recruitment Into the Profession

State Examples

POLICY BRIEF DEC 2025 State Level Efforts to Support School Leaders Lauren Peisach and Sam Nicholson Ensuring that every school has a strong leader is critical for student achievement. Estimating the impact of highly effective principals on student learning is challenging to pinpoint, but researchers agree that strong principals make a substantive and positive difference in student learning. Furthermore, the impact of a school leader is multiplied across the full school building —usually reaching hundreds of students each year. Separate from the impacts on student learning, research demonstrates that school leaders are important decision makers who set the school culture in which educators work and teach. Having school leaders who can support their staff is an important consideration for teacher recruitment and retention. In the RAND Corporation’s 2025 State of the American Teacher Survey, teachers were asked to rank their top sources of stress. Several of the sources of stress cited by teachers can be attributed directly to school leadership like: • Seventeen percent of teachers surveyed said they’re“lacking support from [a] school administrator.” • Twelve percent of teachers cited “limited voice in decision making at my school.” • Nineteen percent of teachers said they’re“feeling like the goals and expectations of the school are unattainable.” Despite the need for effective leaders, some districts continue to face shortages in this crucial position. Though the rate of principals leaving schools declined to 8% for the 2023-24 school year from the high of 16%, the current rate remains higher than pre-COVID 19 pandemic attrition. This continued high attrition Recruiting new, talented leaders to the field is an important strategy to ensure every school has access to highly effective principals who can drive student achievement for years to come. Professional development for school leaders is an important tool policymakers can use to support and retain principals. School leadership is an important policy area for driving student achievement, but it does not garner attention in the same way other issues do. rate underlines the need for renewed attention from policymakers. Research from the Learning Policy Institute identified key factors that impact principal attrition, including inadequate preparation and professional development, poor working conditions, insufficient salaries, lack of decision-making authority and perceptions of accountability policies. Although school leadership is an important need for quality schools, policies pertinent to school leadership have garnered less attention from state policymakers in recent years than other critical shortage areas. As a comparison, in 2025, states passed at least eight bills addressing school leadership compared to 152 bills related to teaching issues. While we have witnessed less attention to school leaders at the state level compared to other positions, there are examples of states who are working to improve in this area. Below, we identify two main focus areas for states working on supporting their principal pipelines and effectiveness of school leaders — recruitment and professional development — and offer strategies to improve school leader recruitment and retention. Recruitment Into the Profession States have taken a variety of approaches to recruit highly qualified and effective school leaders, which often focus on schools experiencing shortages. Studies show that in the recent past, school principals have fewer years of experience than they used to. The average number of years of experience dropped from 10 years in 1988 to around seven years in 2016. This lack of experience is felt most acutely in highest-poverty schools where principals on average had fewer than six years of experience. Some policies use financial incentives, such as salary supplements and bonuses, to attract experienced candidates and retain leaders. Others

FAQs

Why are school leaders important for student achievement and school culture?

Strong principals make a substantive, positive difference in student learning, and school leaders shape the school culture where educators work and teach.

What factors contribute to principal attrition?

Research highlights inadequate preparation and professional development, poor working conditions, insufficient salaries, lack of decision-making authority, and perceptions of accountability policies.

What are the two main focus areas for state efforts?

The brief focuses on recruitment and professional development to improve principal pipelines and the effectiveness of school leaders.

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by Kyle