When Sofia Martinez became the associate superintendent for schools in Oak Bluff School District four years ago, the district was facing real challenges.
“We’re losing qualified principals, we had a big turnover in central office, and we have five outstanding new leaders [whom we cannot afford to lose],” she shared with us. In addition to these challenges, Oak Bluff’s central office staff was grappling with efforts to re-engage students and recover pandemic-era learning loss.
Fortunately for Martinez—and the students in Oak Bluff—a new superintendent, Maria Smith, joined the district. Smith brought with her an emphasis on strategic planning and a strong commitment to leadership development. Smith’s leadership team collaborated with Martinez to transform the district’s existing model of professional development for principals. Oak Bluff, a participant in a multi-year study we conducted, developed a principal pipeline initiative to recruit and prepare new leaders and provide sitting principals with critical development and support.
The challenges Oak Bluff faced are common ones. Principal turnover rates rose after the pandemic, and district leaders continue to face challenges recruiting effective school leaders (Diliberti & Schwartz, 2025). Meanwhile, principals are faced with persistent gaps in educational attainment, increasing rates of student absenteeism and mental health crises, and teacher shortages (Irwin et al., 2024; National Center for Education Statistics, 2024a, 2024b).
The changing social environment presents its own challenges: Schools must prepare students to navigate the labor market and information ecosystem as technologies like AI change the future of work and data literacy (Sharon & Baram-Tsabari, 2020). Likewise, districts need to recruit and retain effective principals with the skills to navigate these trends.
A Promising Solution
Principal pipelines are one promising path to ensure every school has highly effective leaders. These district-led initiatives focus on specific domains—sets of activities or systems to be developed—that are aligned and comprehensive. Principal pipelines often include such areas as revised job descriptions aligned to leadership standards, partnerships with universities to prepare leaders for the community and district context, clear progressions from teacher to assistant principal to principal, on-the-job support and evaluation, and revised approaches to principal supervision.
Research shows principal pipelines have positive effects on student achievement and principal retention. In a comprehensive study of principal pipelines, schools with newly placed principals in districts with pipelines had higher reading and math achievement than comparison schools in districts without pipelines (Gates et al., 2019). These newly placed principals were also more likely to stay at their school: Districts with pipelines averaged 8 fewer losses per 100 newly placed principals after 3 years. These benefits were particularly appealing given the pipeline initiative’s low cost (less than 0.5 percent of a district’s budget).
Many districts have embraced this strategic approach. Recent research estimates that 75 percent of districts nationwide have some principal pipeline activities. Significant differences exist in the extent to which small, medium, and large districts adopt specific pipeline domains (or key activities), but over half of small districts (3,000 students or fewer) implement at least one pipeline activity. The most prevalent domains implemented are on-the-job support and evaluation (75 percent) and leader standards (60 percent) (Diliberti et al., 2024).
Creating Sustainable Pipelines
Anyone who has worked in central offices and schools knows the challenge of maintaining momentum and sustainability for an improvement initiative. Turnover in central office staff and the superintendency can make efforts like principal pipelines hard to maintain. Even without central office turnover, competing priorities and changing district contexts can edge out ambitious efforts and programs. Previous research on principal pipelines found that superintendent stability, cross-departmental teams in central office, good communication structures, and dedicated central office leadership departments can help facilitate pipeline implementation (Goldring et al., 2023).
Sustainability for a principal pipeline can’t be something districts do “after it’s working.” It’s an ongoing process over the life of an initiative.
Our team wanted to know what helps districts create and maintain durable pipelines—rather than short-term projects that disappear when grant funding ends or district leaders change. So we studied The Wallace Foundation’s Principal Pipeline Learning Community (PPLC), interviewing and surveying central office leaders in the 80-plus PPLC districts over multiple years as they developed and implemented pipelines (see Goldring et al., 2023). Participants in the PPLC, which was created in 2019, received tools and resources from The Wallace Foundation, including a leadership development expert for consultation. Some districts started planning and implementing pipelines years before joining the PPLC, while others used the PPLC as a catalyst to conceptualize and develop pipelines.
Four years in, we again interviewed some of the leadership development staff in select PPLC districts to understand how districts sustain principal pipelines. We focused on the policies, practices, and contexts that support pipelines that endure.
Our research that emerged describes building blocks that help districts implement and sustain pipelines—and other improvement initiatives. Through interviewing district leaders and examining research on organizational change, we developed a framework for establishing lasting principal pipelines, our Implementing for Sustainability Framework (Goldring, Rubin, & James McGraw, 2025). This framework offers insights for implementing district improvement initiatives that endure.
Sustainability Has to Be “Installed” from Day One
Our biggest takeaway is that sustainability can’t be an afterthought or something districts do “after it’s working.” Implementing for sustainability starts at the beginning of the change process, continues through initial implementation and institutionalization of the initiative, and extends into refinement and improvement.
Figure 1 shows four dimensions or groups of actions that can create sustainable and enduring pipelines when built into the implementation process. Let’s look at each of these dimensions—and how districts we studied enact them.
Ensuring Strategic Alignment
Districts that sustained pipelines had a clear, shared vision of the pipeline’s purpose. They understood that effective school leaders are key change agents and that pipelines are crucial to staffing the right principals and assistant principals needed to reach community priorities and districtwide goals. These districts placed school leadership at the core of the district vision in policy documents (for example, in their strategic plans).
An associate superintendent who worked in an urban district for decades described her work in central office before the current superintendent arrived and prioritized the principal pipeline:
[The approach to leadership development] just was not strategic, not a measurable improvement plan. . . . But now we have a whole larger strategy for the district that starts with our paraprofessionals, to principal, all the way up to the superintendent. Now, we think about how investing in leaders matters for all our other goals.
Communicating Clarity in Intent
The superintendent and other senior leaders in districts that sustained pipelines not only articulated how their principal pipeline is part of a strategy to move their district closer to achieving its goals—they built awareness of this strategic alignment and intent far beyond central office. Superintendents set the tone that the pipeline was a central strategy to achieve the district’s improvement goals, while other district leaders communicated widely to multiple stakeholders about the importance of principal pipelines, creating buy-in from central office staff, school-based staff, board of education members, and community members.
A district director in a large suburban district shared that her superintendent “makes it a priority. No matter the level of work, he is present. He sees the value.” This superintendent leverages his role to communicate the value of the pipeline outside of central office. “He ensures that we get our programming before the Board of Trustees. He references, at every hire he brings before the board, the [pipeline] programming they’ve graduated from. There’s a constant attention to [leader] development.”
Anyone who has worked in central offices and schools knows the challenge of maintaining momentum and sustainability for an improvement initiative.
External partners in successful districts also played key roles in communicating the value of the pipeline. The chief learning officer in a large urban district described partners from university preparation programs and the principals’ union as “strong advocates” for the pipeline in their networks. An associate superintendent in another district described internal partnerships, saying, “We meet a couple of times a month to talk with school teams about specific needs of the schools. Out of that comes trend data to identify the areas they need support. . . . So, it’s really paying attention and being reflective in meetings that were designed for something else, to help lend itself to valuable insights into next steps for pipeline work.”
Aligning Institutional Elements and Supports
Districts implementing sustainable pipelines worked to align multiple central office departments, policies, and partnerships to support the principal pipeline. In districts with enduring pipelines, a single central office leader or a core integrated team coordinated the domains and activities of the principal pipeline. This district leader or team had the authority in the central office hierarchy to understand the big picture of district needs and organized work across multiple departments. In addition, the designated pipeline leader or team had the authority to manage external partnerships, such as university principal preparation programs.
While our research emphasized the importance of a strong designated pipeline leader, it was more than just having such a leader. In districts sustaining their principal pipelines, the designated leader created coherence in central office around pipeline work by reimagining internal collaboration in central offices, ensuring that central office staff working in principal supervision, professional development, and human resources worked together.
Often, cabinet-level leaders each designated one person from their team to support the pipeline. In one midsize district, the cross-departmental team brought together staff in human resources, finance, student support, teaching and learning, and community engagement to ensure the pipeline team had the contextual knowledge and personnel needed. A district director in a large suburban district shared that it was a “cultural standard” in the district to collaborate across departments on the pipeline. This cultural standard was also policy: District job descriptions stated there is a collaborative responsibility between school leadership (principal supervisors) and academics to work on the pipeline. Multiple districts adapted job descriptions or monthly time effort allocations for existing staff or hired additional staff for the pipeline to have enough support.
Maintaining Priority
Districts that implemented for sustainability aligned pipeline evaluation and accountability with the district’s vision of developing leaders. They made clear which data points would be most relevant to the district when central office staff sat together and said, “Let’s look at the metrics. How do we know the pipeline is in fact recruiting, developing, and retaining effective leaders?”
The chief learning officer in a large urban district tracked whether the pipeline was increasing access to the principalship for underrepresented groups, as well as the three- and five-year retention rates for all new principals in the district who entered through the pipeline. In a large suburban district, a director calculated the percentage of pipeline graduates who advanced to the principalship alongside comparisons of the overall evaluation scores and specific strengths and weaknesses of principals who did and didn’t participate in the district’s pipeline.
Central office leaders collecting these data shared “return on investment” in terms of principals’ ability to coach and retain teachers, the percent of schools with experienced principals, or whether there was diversity in those entering the principalship. Adopting a flexible, continuous improvement approach to the principal pipeline required specific, measurable goals to guide ongoing data collection and feedback.
Takeaways for District Leaders
Principal pipelines are a cost-effective strategy for developing and retaining effective school leaders. By considering sustainability from the outset, central office leaders can implement leadership pipeline strategies that adapt to their evolving needs and circumstances while developing and maintaining effective school leaders for all schools. For instance, since Oak Bluff focused on developing a strong principal pipeline and more coordinated principal support and development, the district has been retaining more school leaders and seeing broader central office improvements. As associate superintendent Martinez puts it, “It’s really about connecting or being intentionally aligned in our programs.” She shared that an organizational approach helps the district “see the direction: We need to continue moving to not just sustain, but to continue to evolve and grow.”
We believe the actions laid out in our Implementing for Sustainability Framework can help district leaders avoid the pitfalls that doom many promising change efforts. By considering these practices, policies, and contexts from the start, districts can implement principal pipelines that are built to last.
Authors’ note: We acknowledge support from The Wallace Foundation for this project. The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the sponsor.
Further Reading
Download The Wallace Foundation’s report, Implementing for Sustainability: Principal Pipelines in Four Districts.
Reflect & Discuss
After reading this article, what gaps would you say your school or district has in supporting leadership recruitment and development? How could they be addressed?
Try this with some colleagues: Individually write a few sentences about your district’s approach to leadership development, then compare notes. Do you have a shared understanding of the importance of principals and specifically how your district supports them?
