New Principals, School Working Conditions, and School Staffing

• In Event: Promising Scholarship in Education: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research

Abstract

Despite a great deal of policy attention, retaining high-quality teachers remains a critical problem for many public schools. Recent national estimates show that 25% of new public school teachers leave the schools where they are initially hired within three years (Kaiser & Cross, 2011); teacher turnover is even higher in some urban districts, where the average public school loses more than 50% of its teachers every five years (Allensworth, Ponisciak, & Mazzeo, 2009). This turnover presents a variety of problems for schools, including the loss of more experienced and effective teachers (Ingersoll, 2001), disruptions to organizational coherence and morale (Allensworth et al., 2009; Smith & Ingersoll, 2004), and significant financial costs (Alliance for Excellent Education, 2005; Barnes, Crowe, & Schaefer, 2007). Understanding the factors that drive teachers to leave their schools is important to addressing these issues.
School working conditions are important predictors of teacher turnover (Ingersoll, 2001; Johnson, 1990, 2006; Johnson & Birkeland, 2003; Ladd, 2011; Loeb, Darling-Hammond, & Luczak, 2005), and principals are crucial determinants of school working conditions. Principals manage school materials, schedules, and budgets (Bryk, Sebring, Allensworth, Luppescu, & Easton, 2010; Johnson, 2006), provide instructional guidance and support (Blase & Blase, 2000; Johnson, 2006), and develop the social and human resources of their schools into professional communities (Kruse, Louis, & Bryk, 1995). To change these aspects of their schools, principals must engage a variety of stakeholders, build trust among them, and push them towards a common goal or purpose (Bryk et al., 2010). Principals play a particularly important role in building the “social contexts” of schools, an aspect of school working conditions that includes school culture, principal leadership, and collegial relationships among school staff, and which is highly predictive of teachers’ career satisfaction (Johnson et al., 2011). Attention to these social contexts is particularly important for novice principals (Crow, 2006; Weindling & Dimmock, 2006), who comprise a large percentage of principals, particularly in urban districts (Stoelinga, Hart, & Schalliol, 2008). Understanding these principals’ roles in shaping school working conditions is therefore crucial to improving those working conditions and, in turn, teacher retention.
Shaping the teaching staffs of their schools through hiring, retention, and removal is also an important task for new principals, particularly when their schools are in need of improvement (Weindling & Dimmock, 2006). Yet balancing the roles of facilitator of the “social context” of schools on one hand and shaper of a teaching staff on the other may create tension or conflict for new principals. To improve their schools, principals must build relationships with their teachers and create a sense of community, cohesiveness, and trust; yet to shape their teaching staffs, principals must outright fire or, in other cases, “counsel out” teachers from their schools. Balancing these two imperatives exemplifies a larger tension experienced by many principals, who must both build relationships and aggressively confront the problems in their schools (Bryk et al., 2010). How principals negotiate this tension has significant implications for both school working conditions and teacher retention.

Author

• Matthew A. Shirrell, Northwestern University