whether the principal remains in the school in the following year) to consider whether effects vary by different types of leadership transitions (e.g., transfers to a different school, promo- tions to central office). This innovation is important because not all principal turnover events are created equal. For example, Grissom and Bartanen (2019a) find that low-performing prin- cipals are substantially more likely to be demoted into non-principal school-level positions or to exit education altogether, while high performers are more likely to move into central administration. Relatedly, Walsh and Dotter (2019) find positive effects on student achieve- ment of dismissals of presumably under-performing principals. Different kinds of principal transitions thus may have different net impacts on school outcomes.
Using longitudinal administrative data from Missouri and Tennessee, we aim to answer three main research questions. First, what is the effect of principal turnover on school performance, especially student achievement, up to five years after the transition? Second, to what extent do these effects vary by the type of principal turnover (transfers, exits, promotions, demotions)? Finally, what mechanisms explain the connection between principal turnover and school performance? Our answers to this last question extend the literature significantly beyond investigating the role of teacher retention in linking principal turnover to student achievement (Béteille et al., 2012; Miller, 2013) to examine changes in teacher quality, school climate, and principal quality in explaining principal turnover effects.
which in turn can focus and enhance instructional practices and increase student achieve- ment (e.g., Sebastian and Allensworth, 2012; Robinson et al., 2008; Leithwood and Jantzi, 2000; Marks and Printy, 2003). Gaining an understanding of school needs and establishing relationships with teachers and other members of the school community likely are fundamen- tal to this chain; it may take new leaders considerable time to build the required knowledge and relationships that exiting principals possess. As another example, principals can drive student outcomes via effective human capital management, including strategic hiring and retention of effective teachers (Grissom and Bartanen, 2019b; Master, 2014). To the degree that principal transitions create instability and uncertainty about future leadership, such transitions may make it more difficult for a school to attract and retain high-performing teachers.
Disruptive effects of principal turnover likely are negative. As Ronfeldt et al. (2013) note, however, the overall impact of turnover depends on the combination of these negative disruptive effects with anyreplacement effects. Replacement effects are those associated with acquiring a new principal who is more or less effective than the outgoing principal. If districts tend to replace outgoing principals with even less effective new principals, replacement effects will be negative. In contrast, if principal turnover tends to result in higher-quality leadership in the principal’s office, replacement effects will be positive, and potentially even positive enough to outweigh any disruptive effects. Importantly, it may take several years for positive replacement effects to outweigh disruptive effects, making principal turnover harmful in the short-term but beneficial in the medium- to long-term.
Several prior studies have attempted to test the overall effects of principal turnover on school, teacher, and student outcomes. However, measuring the causal effect of changing principals is challenging because principal turnover is not an exogenous event. As Miller (2013) demonstrates in a study of principal turnover in North Carolina, school performance is on a downward trajectory, on average, for several years prior to when the principal leaves the school. This pattern raises the possibility that declines in school performance may drive
turnover, making it challenging to isolate the effect of the transition. The rebounding to the school’s “steady state” one or two years after the principal transition that Miller (2013) finds may have occurred even if the school had kept the same principal. Other confounding factors may also be at play. For example, in the case of struggling school, district leaders may choose to change principals in conjunction with other strategies to improve school performance, such as targeted professional development for teachers or funding for new instructional materials.
Alternatively, the downturn in school performance may be driven by short-term factors that the principal cannot control, such as neighborhood violence or a spate of retirements among effective teachers. In either of these situations, a naïve comparison of pre-transition and post-transition outcomes fails to isolate the effect of a principal switch.
To our knowledge, only one existing study has employed an empirical strategy that iso- lates the effect of principal turnover from these alternative explanations. Walsh and Dotter (2019) use a difference-in-differences design to estimate the effect of a principal replacement policy in Washington, DC Public Schools, which was part of a broader set of accountability reforms in the district. They find that schools whose principals were replaced under the policy had 0.09 SD higher school-wide student achievement after the third year of the new principal compared to schools that kept the same principal.2 Our study complements this one by examining effects of a broad range of turnover types (as opposed to a specific replace- ment policy) across two states. Distinguishing among different types of principal turnover (e.g., exits, promotions to central office), which other studies generally have not done, is im- portant because transitions of different types may represent different processes with different consequences for school performance. For example, exits and demotions to non-principal po- sitions may be more likely among low-performers who are removed or counseled out of the principal role, while moves to central office may be more likely for more effective principals
2In a study of data from Miami-Dade County Public Schools, Béteille et al. (2012) find that having a new principal is associated with a decline in math scores of 0.007 SD, and that this relationship is driven by new principals who are novices, i.e., who have no prior principal experience. As the authors note, the interpretation of this estimate as the causal effect of the transition rests on the assumption that schools are not experiencing a downward achievement trajectory prior to principal turnover, which the study does not explicitly examine.
(Farley-Ripple et al., 2012; Grissom and Bartanen, 2019a). Replacement effects may vary in these cases. To the extent that some kinds of transitions are anticipated and planned for more than others, disruptive effects may vary as well.
Building on existing research, our study makes three main contributions to our under- standing of the effects of principal turnover. First, we employ an identification strategy that more plausibly isolates the impact of principal turnover from the circumstances that may have led to the transition. Second, we move beyond a binary turnover measure to examine whether specific types of principal transitions are more or less harmful to school performance. Finally, we investigate a range of potential mechanisms—both compositional and disruptive—through which the effects of principal turnover may operate.