Trends in California Principals Over Time

• In Event: Strengthening Equitable School Leadership: California Principals, Policies, and Best Practices

Abstract

This paper presents the results from an exploratory analysis examining the trends in mobility, experience, and demographics of California’s principals over the past decade. Specifically, this paper answers the following questions: Who are the principals of California’s K-12 public schools? Have the characteristics of individuals becoming and remaining principals changed over time? What types of schools do principals leave most frequently? What might contribute to principals leaving a school and/or the profession?

We are able to shine new light on these questions using restricted-use data for all California educators from the 2009-10 to 2018-19 academic years. We also use the recently released National Teacher and Principal Survey for 2017-18, which provides representative data about school leaders, enabling us to compare California principals to their peers nationwide. Our models report the basic descriptive statistics, including errors, for principals over time.

Our results reveal four key trends amongst California principals. First, they turn over more than principals nationwide. We define turnover as principals who leave their school for any reason, including to retire, move to another school, become a district-level administrator, or leave the profession altogether. High-poverty schools, schools serving the highest proportions of students of color, and secondary schools consistently experience the greatest levels of principal turnover. The high rates of principal turnover are concerning because it can take many years for principals to make a meaningful improvement in their schools (Bartanen, Grissom, & Rogers, 2019). Second, California principals are more inexperienced in their current school compared to principals nationwide, which is troubling because multiple studies document that more experienced principals are associated with improved student and school outcomes (Bastian & Henry, 2015; Béteille, Kalogrides, & Loeb, 2012; Clark, Martorell, & Rockoff, 2009; Grissom, Blissett, & Mitani, 2018; Miller, 2013). Third, California principals are unrepresentative of their students’ race/ethnicity. Finally, California principals are more likely to be male than the state’s teaching workforce. Almost 75 percent of California teachers are female, while only 60 percent of California principals are female. Relying upon human capital theory and the econometric literature, we argue that these trends bode poorly for an increasingly diverse student body population and their outcomes, and they mirror racial and gender gaps nationwide.

This paper fills a gap in the literature by providing the most up-to-date analysis of California principal characteristics and their career decisions and signals a call to action for policymakers looking to align recruitment, training, and retention of diverse principals. We build on prior analyses that have relied on smaller samples of principals, and we provide a more precise portrait of California’s principals and their trends. By better understanding the types of people who serve as principals as well as the types of schools they are most likely to leave, policymakers can target incentives (Cowan & Goldhaber, 2018) to principals most at risk of leaving their schools or the profession, and to historically underserved schools experiencing a revolving door of principals.

Author

• Anne Podolsky, Stanford University