Principal Effects on Teacher Working Conditions

June 2026

Research on school principals highlights their role in shaping teachers’ work environments, but most evidence is qualitative or correlational. We provide plausibly causal estimates of how principals affect a wide range of teacher working conditions using data from Illinois, where the State Board of Education collects detailed information on working conditions annually. Our identification strategy exploits differences in the persistence of working conditions over time between schools that do and do not experience principal turnover. Under reasonable stationarity assumptions, these differences can be used to estimate the variance of principal effects. We find substantial heterogeneity in principal effects across different dimensions of teacher working conditions. Principals have large effects on leadership-specific working conditions, but much smaller effects on other working conditions. We find no evidence that principal effects on working conditions translate to meaningful effects on teacher turnover.

Keywords

School Principals; Teacher Working Conditions; School Management; Principal Effects

Education level

K-12 Education

Topics

Teacher and Leader Development