Can Good Principals Keep Teachers in Disadvantaged Schools? Linking Principal Effectiveness to Teacher Satisfaction and Turnover in Hard-to-Staff Environments

By Jason A. Grissom. Teachers College Record, 2011

338 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Background High rates of teacher turnover likely mean greater school instability, disruption of curricular cohesiveness, and a continual need to hire inexperienced teachers, who typically are less effective, as replacements for teachers who leave. Unfortunately, research consistently finds that teachers who work in schools with large numbers of poor students and students of color feel less satisfied and are more likely to turn over, meaning that turnover is concentrated in the very schools that would benefit most from a stable staff of experienced teachers. Despite the potential challenge that this turnover disparity poses for equity of educational opportunity and student performance gaps across schools, little research has examined the reasons for elevated teacher turnover in schools with large numbers of traditionally disadvantaged students. Purpose This study hypothesizes that school working conditions help explain both teacher satisfaction and turnover. In particular, it focuses on the role of effective principals in retaining teachers, particularly in disadvantaged schools with the greatest staffing challenges. Research Design The study conducts quantitative analyses of national data from the 2003-04 Schools and Staffing Survey and the 2004-05 Teacher Follow-up Survey. Regression analyses combat the potential for bias from omitted variables by utilizing an extensive set of control variables and employing a school district fixed effects approach that implicitly makes comparisons among principals and teachers within the same local context. Conclusions Descriptive analyses confirm that observable measures of teachers’ work environments, including ratings of the effectiveness of the principal, are generally less positive in schools with large numbers of disadvantaged students. Regression results show that principal effectiveness is associated with greater teacher satisfaction and a lower probability that the teacher leaves the school within a year. Moreover, the positive impacts of principal effectiveness on these teacher outcomes are even greater in disadvantaged schools. These findings suggest that policies focused on getting the best principals into the most challenging school environments may be effective strategies for lowering perpetually high teacher turnover rates in those schools.

Subfields: Education

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Citations in the corpus

Estimating the Effects of No Child Left Behind on Teachers’ Work Environments and Job Attitudes (2014, result): “Finally, research has also found support from supervisors and colleagues to be a strong correlate of satisfaction (Allensworth et al., 2009; Bloland & Selby, 1980; Grissom, 2011).”
Easy in, Easy out (2016, methodology): “The scale measure of principal effectiveness is adapted from previous usages of SASS (e.g., Grissom, 2011).”
Teacher job satisfaction by principal support and teacher cooperation: Results from the Schools and Staffing Survey (2019, background): “…literature, when there are strong levels of principal support and teacher cooperation within a school, there are higher levels of job satisfaction (Brown & Wynn, 2009; Durksen et al., 2017; Griffith, 2004; Grissom, 2011; Leithwood et al., 1998; Moir, 2009; Petzko, 2004; Vangrieken et al., 2015).”
The Importance of Minority Teachers (2016, background): “, 2006; Ingersoll & May, 2011), such as by having strong administrative support for minority educators (Grissom, 2011; Grissom & Keiser, 2011).”
Exploring the Causal Impact of the McREL Balanced Leadership Program on Leadership, Principal Efficacy, Instructional Climate, Educator Turnover, and Student Achievement (2015, background): “Similarly, research shows that teachers are more likely to stay in a school where they feel the principal is a strong instructional leader (Allensworth, 2012; Boyd et al., 2011; Grissom, 2011; Ladd, 2011).”
School Organizational Contexts, Teacher Turnover, and Student Achievement (2016, background): “…offers one of the highest leverage points for shaping the organizational practices and culture of a school (Boyd et al. 2011; Bryk et al., 2010; Grissom, 2011), another potential extension of these findings could be to use measures of schools’ organizational contexts to inform principal hiring…”