The Educator Shortage: Keeping Great Educational Leaders in the Game

• In Event: Borderlands: Constructing Educational Possibilities Across P–20 Systems: A Structured Conversation Between Educational Leadership and Teacher Education

Abstract

A key challenge of contemporary education leadership is sustaining and retaining the leaders currently in schools. Turnover (movement among schools) and attrition (departure from the profession) are both kinds of exit that are detrimental to individual schools as well as their faculties and communities (Fuller & Pendola, 2019). Certainly, concerns about turnover have rightly amplified following the COVID-19 pandemic: while results remain mixed about COVID-induced turnover in the national (United States) context leaders (e.g., Diliberti & Schwartz, 2021), some rural schools, for example, have experienced more novice principals and more attrition than have their urban or suburban peers (DeMatthews et al., 2022).
Relatedly, the conditions in which principals carry out their work are typically challenging and personally taxing and thus do not tend to foster the kind of longevity that benefits teachers, students, and school communities. Leaders tend to leave schools for one of five reasons: insufficient preparation and professional learning opportunities, poor working conditions, poor compensation, lack of authority, and onerous or ineffective accountability policies (Levin et al., 2019).

As these organizational challenges persist, principal turnover has increased so that the national average of a principal’s tenure in a single school is about four years (Authors). The dearth of veteran leaders and administrators also has consequences for novice leaders, who may miss out on opportunities for mentoring or sponsorship from more experienced school leaders (Glass et al., 2013). This condition is likely to be especially detrimental to women and minoritized school leaders. Under normal conditions, women and minoritized school leaders—Black leaders, Latinx leaders, queer and nonbinary leaders, and individuals who live at the intersections of these identities—experience discrimination and reduced or slowed opportunities for advancement (Authors; Lugg & Tooms, 2010). In cases where the corps of veteran leadership has thinned, nonwhite and nonmale leaders are likely to suffer the added consequences of isolation and a lack of systems designed to uplift and support minoritized leaders (Cheung & Gong, 2022).

Taken together, these examples suggest that the growing challenge of leader retention is a key challenge in educational leadership. Leader mobility (turnover and attrition) have lasting consequences for individuals schools, for students—especially students of color—and for school communities. These realities suggest a serious need to understand the interaction of individual preparation, school organizational conditions, and resource allocations in order to support the longevity of effective leaders in the profession.

Authors

• Jessica Shiller, Towson University

• Lauren P. Bailes, University of Delaware

• Sarah Odell, The Hewitt School

• Frank Hernandez, Texas Christian University