Teacher Retention and Leadership Development Aren’t Two Problems. They’re One.

Leadership development functions as a teacher retention strategy: districts that structure how principals and assistant principals are trained see measurably higher administrator retention, and administrator stability is one of the strongest predictors of whether teachers stay. This is relevant for superintendents, Chief Schools Officers, HR directors, and leadership development leads building or evaluating a district leadership pipeline. 

Ask why a teacher left, and you’ll almost always hear one of two answers: pay, or burnout. Both are real and neither is wrong. But rarely does the answer draw a line back to building leadership – to who was running the school and what kind of culture they built there.

The data suggests it should. In a recent informal LinkedIn poll Frontline education ran, asking educators what’s actually moving the needle on teacher retention, 59% of 136 respondents pointed to strong leadership and culture. The next closest answer, growth opportunities, came in at just 19% — nowhere near pay. Meanwhile, national data on the leadership side tells its own cautionary story: Frontline’s 2026 K-12 Lens report found that a larger share of districts reported difficulty hiring administrators this year than last, even as the RAND Corporation’s American School District Panel shows principal turnover has dropped substantially since its pandemic-era peak, from 16% in 2021-22 down to 8.2% — encouraging on its face, but set against rising hiring difficulty, a sign that the pipeline behind those leaders is thin.

Retention and leadership development get treated as separate conversations, funded out of separate budgets, owned by separate departments. Frontline ran a second poll asking district leaders directly what leadership development opportunities exist where they work: 40% said nothing structured. Another 33% offer coaching or professional learning sessions, and 24% offer funding for outside courses or PD. Just 1% — a single respondent – said their district runs an in-district internship, even though internship-style, job-embedded preparation is the version most closely tied to teachers staying, according to the research below. According to this small sample, districts believe leadership matters. Almost none of them are structurally investing in it as if it does.

A recent Frontline Education and Education Week webinar, Grow Leaders, Keep Teachers: Leadership Development as a Staffing Strategy, made a case that they shouldn’t be. The district willing to draw that line stands to address both problems with one investment.

The panel paired a researcher studying why teachers stay with members of the Leadership Development team at Orange County Public Schools (OCPS) — the eighth-largest school district in the country — who’ve spent three years building exactly that kind of investment. What emerged was less a list of best practices than a thesis: teachers don’t leave because of a single bad year or a single missed raise. They leave when the workplace stops feeling compatible with who they are as professionals. And the person who shapes that compatibility, more than any policy memo, is the principal down the hall. 

Why Pay Isn’t the Real Reason Teachers Leave 

Dr. John Settlage, PhD, a research professor at the University of Connecticut who has spent years preparing future science teachers, has spent an equal amount of time trying to understand why the ones he trains stay or go. His research followed science and math teachers in Connecticut who’d stayed in the profession more than ten years, asking them — and their sense of why peers had left.

What he found wasn’t compensation. It was something closer to fit — except, as he put it, “it’s not like fit. It’s not like if a shoe fits or not. It’s more like it’s the give and take in the relationship, helping them feel like they’re making a difference or not.” He calls it compatibility: the alignment between who a teacher is as a professional and what the workplace asks of them. The second factor was autonomy — not being hands-off, but being trusted. “How much does the department or the administration… feel like we trust you enough, you’re professional enough, we’re not going to question what you’re doing all the time.” 

Settlage shared an interview with a teacher he called Mike — a Black male science teacher with ten years in the classroom, one of Settlage’s own former students — who left his school not because of money, even though money was a real strain:

“With inflation, I had to pick up a second job. I had to start doing DoorDash at my previous school. I may have made that work if it felt like we were truly dedicated to the work we’re doing. I’m a true believer in what I do. I probably would have allowed the suffering if there’d been more hope that we were doing something meaningful.”

Mike moved districts and did end up earning more. But that, Settlage said, was a trade-off Mike accepted reluctantly. The real driver was that he no longer believed the school was doing something he believed in. Compensation was the friction, but purpose was the fracture line. 

How Principals Drive Teacher Retention, According to Research 

If compatibility and trust are what keep teachers, then the person best positioned to build or break both, day to day, is the school leader. That’s the argument behind the Learning Policy Institute’s recent piece “The Principal Effect,” which the webinar’s moderator, Kevin Agnello, PhD, of Frontline’s product team, brought into the conversation. LPI’s case is that K-12’s biggest challenges — chronic absenteeism, learning loss, teacher shortages — tend to get treated as separate problems with separate fixes, when they may share a common root: school leadership. LPI ties principal influence to three things: instruction, retention, and climate; and notes the retention effect is strongest in high-need schools, where teachers under effective, supportive leadership are less likely to leave. 

Settlage, when asked what it is about leadership that has such outsized influence, returned to trust: “I think there’s a lot about how much trust people feel toward the leader… that you have a competent leader that does what they say they’re going to do, that people act with integrity in those relationships, that they show some personal regard, and they’re efficient at what they do.” Not just social trust, he added — professional trust, the kind that gets built or eroded in a thousand small interactions. 

Why Few Districts have Structured Leadership Development 

Here’s where the conversation turned uncomfortable. If strong, trustworthy leadership is this influential, districts should be investing heavily in developing it. LPI’s research suggests the highest-leverage form of that investment is the principal internship — hands-on, job-embedded practice before someone ever sits in the seat alone. A 2017 study of 462 California elementary and middle school principals found that high-quality preservice preparation and ongoing learning were linked to stronger teacher retention down the line. 

But LPI also found that only 40% of principals reported having a high-quality internship during their prep program. Six in ten stepped into the role without one. And access wasn’t distributed evenly: principals in high-poverty schools were less than half as likely as their peers to have an on-the-job mentor or coach. 

Frontline’s own poll of district leadership development practices landed in the same place. Asked what leadership development opportunities exist in their district, 40% of 66 respondents said nothing structured. About a third had coaching or professional learning sessions. A quarter had funding for courses or PD. Only one respondent — 2% — reported an in-district internship. 

The research says internship-style, job-embedded development is the strategy most linked to outcomes, but the poll says it’s nearly the rarest thing districts offer. That’s the gap Kevin Agnello framed heading into the OCPS portion of the conversation: “Building a leadership development program isn’t obvious. There’s no standard model to copy. Most districts are starting from scratch while running everything else.” 

Inside OCPS’s Leadership Development Continuum 

Three years ago, according to Dr. Kathryn Schuler, OCPS’s Chief Schools Officer, the district surveyed its own principals and assistant principals and heard almost exactly what the national research would later confirm: people wanted a structured, staged way to grow. “We view leadership development as a staffing and retention strategy,” Schuler said, “not just leadership development… our leadership academy aligns directly with our district priorities around retention, internal promotion, student achievement, and leadership capacity.” 

What they built is a continuum, not a single program. It starts before anyone holds a title: a Developing Teacher Leaders program open to any teacher curious about leading, a Teacher Leaders Academy for those with three-plus years of experience, and an Aspiring Leaders Academy for teachers who already hold their educational leadership certification. None of these gatekeep the others, Director of Leadership Development Dr. Ashlyn Ramirez explained — they’re parallel entry points, not a single required ladder. 

Once someone becomes an assistant principal, support gets specific. Year one pairs every new AP with a trained peer mentor from within their “cadre” and four professional learning sessions chosen based on survey feedback from administrators about what they truly needed when they first took on their new roles. Year two adds what OCPS calls a “problem of practice” visit: the district’s leadership team comes to the AP’s school four times a year, and the AP — not the district — drives the agenda. “It’s very authentic because it’s led by the assistant principal,” Ramirez said. “It’s not directed by us. It’s led. We are very non-evaluative in our work.” 

By year three, assistant principals move into the Preparing Future Principals Academy, a job-embedded, five-step program redesigned to be completed in a single year, connecting APs with budget experts, researchers, and other specialists across the district before they ever apply for principal certification. 

Principals get a parallel structure once they step into the role — a peer mentor matched by cadre, four required PD sessions built from surveys of both veteran and brand-new principals, twice-monthly mentor check-ins, and, new this year, “lab schools”: demonstration sites where administrators can see strong practice modeled hands-on. In year two, the mentor becomes what OCPS calls a collaborative coach, running problem-of-practice visits built around each principal’s own beginning-of-year action plan and school improvement goals. 

Angela Feliciano, a principal on assignment with OCPS’s Leadership Development team, summed up the design principle underneath all of it: “The continuum is designed to meet principals where they are in their leadership journey.” And even the funding reflects the district’s intent — mentors and peer coaches receive a small stipend through Title II leadership development dollars, a signal, however modest, that the district treats this work as real work. 

The Part That Isn’t Just About Principals 

It would be easy to read all of this as a pipeline for producing more administrators. Settlage’s read was more interesting than that. “It sounded as if leadership was much more than just being administrative,” he said. “It seems that there are ways to develop people to become leaders within their school but not leave the classroom or their department. I think that infuses this sense of shared purpose within a school.” 

He pointed to a teacher from his own research — also, by coincidence, named Angela, distinct from OCPS’s Angela Feliciano — who entered a district leadership program, decided partway through that administration wasn’t the right fit for her at that point in her career, and returned to the classroom. Settlage was careful to frame that as anything but a retreat: “That training changed how she viewed herself as a teacher because she could better appreciate what happens administratively.” She later became a department chair. The leadership development didn’t just produce a principal candidate — it changed how she saw her own classroom and gave her a different kind of influence from inside it. 

That distinction matters for the thesis here. If Settlage is right that teachers stay when they feel trusted and purposeful, then leadership development isn’t a side benefit for the small number of teachers who want to become administrators. It’s one of the more concrete ways a district can hand any educator something to point to — evidence that they’re seen as a professional, not just staffed as a position. As Schuler put it when asked how OCPS defines leadership at all: “Leaders are not just principals or assistant principals. They’re anyone who has influence on another to drive change.” 

What OCPS is Seeing 

None of this would matter if it weren’t showing up in the numbers. According to Dr. Schuler, looking at the 2025–26 retention data for OCPS’s school-based administrators: 100% of assistant principals who were in their first-year last year are staying in their role for 2026–27. 100% of principals were retained as well. Looking at administrators in their second year, 89% of assistant principals and 81% of principals were retained. 

Program participation has grown alongside those numbers — from 128 principals and assistant principals engaged in leadership learning in the pilot year to 241 today, a shift Dr. Schuler attributed directly to the district’s habit of adjusting the program based on ongoing feedback from participants, principal supervisors, and teachers. Dr. Schuler also pointed to gains in student achievement data at schools led by administrators who came through the continuum. 

The Culture Question Underneath the Structure 

One audience question cut against the polish of all this: doesn’t school leadership have an ego problem — an intimidation culture where administrators feel they have to perform certainty rather than admit what they don’t know? Dr. Schuler’s answer located OCPS’s whole approach in a single idea:

Dr. Ramirez went further, describing a deliberate reframe her team uses in every session: shifting the posture from “gotcha” to “I’ve got your back” — holding people accountable, she said, “in a way that is intentional, authentic, compassionate, firm compassionate.” She offered a test her team returns to constantly: “These teachers and staff members go home and they talk about you at the dinner table. How is that conversation going to sound?” It’s an unusually human way to hold a leadership framework accountable — not to a rubric, but to what people say when no one from the district is listening.

The Takeaway: Leadership Development Is a Retention Strategy 

Take the pieces together and the thesis holds up cleanly. Teachers stay when they trust their leader and feel their work is compatible with who they are. Principals are the ones who build or erode that trust, building by building, day by day. Most districts know this instinctively but haven’t structured anything around it — 40% report no structured leadership development at all, even though the research says job-embedded, internship-style development is the version most linked to teachers staying. OCPS built the structure anyway, treated it explicitly as a staffing strategy rather than a professional development line item, and is now watching both administrators and — by extension — the teachers who work for them stick around.

The lesson isn’t that every district needs OCPS’s exact five-step academy or its cadre system. It’s narrower and more useful than that: leadership development and teacher retention were never two line items competing for the same budget. They’re the same investment, made once, paying out twice.

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