MELISSA KAY DILIBERTI, HEATHER L. SCHWARTZ, SAMANTHA E. DiNICOLA
How School Districts
Prepare and Develop
School Principals
Selected Findings from the Spring 2024
American School District Panel Survey
B
etween 2011 and 2016, our RAND colleagues monitored six large urban districts’ efforts
to develop systematic processes to support the preparation, hiring, development, evalua-
tion, and support of school leaders (subsequently referred to as principal pipeline activities)
(Gates et al., 2019). These districts that invested in such activities outperformed comparison
districts in reading and math achievement, leading researchers to conclude that implementation
of principal pipeline activities was feasible, effective, and affordable (Gates et al., 2019). Given the
promising results, our colleagues
conducted interviews with 192 dis-
trict leaders in 2019 to learn more
details about their principal pipeline
activities (Gates et al., 2020). These
studies—funded under The Wallace
Foundation’s Principal Pipeline Ini-
tiative (PPI)—identified 11 key prin-
cipal pipeline activities distributed
across seven domains, which we sum-
marize in Table 1.
Importantly, until now, the body
of work looking at principal pipe-
line activities has almost exclusively
involved districts serving 10,000
students or more (Gates et al., 2019;
Goldring et al., 2023) or involved case
studies of single districts or states
KEY FINDINGS
■ Assistant principalship is the main pathway into principalship
in large districts (those serving 10,000 students or more) and
medium districts (those serving 3,000 to 9,999 students), but not
in small districts (those serving fewer than 3,000 students).
■ Of the seven domains of principal pipeline activities we examined,
districts most commonly provided written leader standards for
principals and on-the-job supports for novice principals. Leader
tracking systems and dedicated support staff were the least com-
mon activities.
■ A greater share of large districts than of small (and often medium)
districts invested in all seven domains of principal pipeline activi-
ties that we examined.
■ As of spring 2024, districts did not foresee cuts to their existing
principal pipeline infrastructure when coronavirus disease 2019
(COVID-19) federal aid was set to expire in September 2024.
Research Report
