From a recently published CTP policy brief:
Principals play a critical role in creating healthy, inclusive, and effective learning environments. As instructional leaders, principals oversee teacher hiring, development, and retention, help set schoolwide expectations, and represent the school in the local community. As community leaders, principals are responsible for leveraging resources to disrupt inequities in educational opportunity. Like teachers, principals have faced unprecedented pressure during the COVID-19 period. Survey data suggest they experienced increased levels of stress and burnout. How that trend affects job performance and turnover will have consequences for students. While studies highlight recent increases in teacher attrition, limited research examines principal turnover during the COVID-19 era.
Figure 1 compares principal and teacher turnover three years into the COVID-19 pandemic for the state of Washington. Principal turnover declined in the first year of the pandemic, but increased in the subsequent two years, with the largest increase in the most recent year, turnover from 2021-22 to 2022-23. Teacher turnover is similar, but the recent increase is not as large.
Read the entire policy brief here:
Knight, D. S., Candelaria, C. A., Sun, M., Almasi, P., Shin, J., DeMatthews, D. (2024). Principal retention and turnover during the COVID-19 Era: Do students have equitable access to stable school leadership? Seattle, WA: Center for the Study of Teaching and Learning, University of Washington. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/51017
Read the Washington STEM blog post description here: https://washingtonstem.org/principal-turnover/
And the forthcoming policy brief in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis:
Knight, D. S., Candelaria, C. A., Sun, M., Almasi, P., Shin, J., DeMatthews, D. (2025). Educator Retention in Context: Understanding Patterns in Principal Turnover in Texas and Washington State During the COVID-19 Era. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis.