The School Principal and Teacher Retention

This report comes from the MERC Teacher Retention study. This study was designed to identify patterns of teacher retention in the MERC region and to determine the school and system-level factors driving them. The study also provides an overview of state and regional policies and programs relevant to teacher retention, and includes evaluations of existing policies and initiatives to determine efficacy and cost benefit. This policy brief examines the role of leadership, and specifically the school principal, in retaining teachers. The brief includes a review of studies that used survey scales to measure leadership and then disaggregate and re-aggregate the items in those scales into a handful of common themes. The purpose of this policy brief is to review the foundational literature on the role of the principal in order to develop a set of focus areas for principals who want to improve teacher retention