21CSLA Brief: Finding Resilience During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Perspectives from School Principals (Part 4/Volume 4)

The COVID-19 pandemic sparked various, unprecedented challenges to public education, including transitions among remote, hybrid, and in-person learning as well as increased attention to the emotional and physical well-being of teachers, students, families, and communities. School principals were tasked with responding to these new realities as they practiced crisis leadership (Grissom & Condon, 2021), but also aimed to lead for equity, excellence, and accountability. Unsurprisingly, these new demands and additional duties exacerbated already heightened levels of job-related stress for principals. Principal turnover in U.S. schools is at a crisis point: a 2021 survey from the National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP; 2021) revealed that 40% of principals expect to leave the profession within three years, thereby threatening school improvement and stability. Given that it typically takes five to seven years for school leadership to effect meaningful change (Fullan, 2002), high turnover disrupts progress, hampers policy implementation, and leads to costly hiring and onboarding processes. Therefore, it is critical to understand factors impacting principal turnover and retention in order to minimize the challenges and obstacles school principals face in their profession. To address this practice and research need, the 21CSLA research team launched a fourth wave of the Principal Resilience Study, a longitudinal survey study designed to identify significant school-related stressors and psychological factors that protect school principals from burnout, specifically in the COVID-19 pandemic context. The survey was open to all active K–12 school principals in California during the 2023–2024 school year. This wave included a new measure on turnover and retention; in this brief, we focus our findings on data analyzed from the new turnover/retention measure.