Principal Effects on Teacher Working Conditions

May 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 broad swath of teacher working conditions using data from Illinois, where the State Board of Education collects detailed and comprehensive information on teacher 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. Unsurprisingly, we find principals have large effects on working conditions related to leadership directly. Principals also influence teachers’ professional work environments and their interactions with students and families, though to a lesser extent.

Keywords

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

Education level

K-12 Education

Topics

Teacher and Leader Development