The NASBE Interview: Rotunda Floyd-Cooper

Rotunda Floyd-Cooper is vice president of education leadership at The Wallace Foundation. NASBE President and CEO Paolo DeMaria interviewed her in March 2026.

Why is The Wallace Foundation so invested in principal quality?

We have invested in understanding and improving the role of the school principal for more than two decades. We learned early on that principals really do matter in schools. More specifically, they support positive impacts on student achievement, teacher retention, and teacher satisfaction.

Transformative principals really are not born out of thin air; they must be developed. The development of high-quality principals requires intentional and coordinated efforts by school districts and their partners, especially policymakers and states. Over the past decade, we have been exploring and testing whether and how school districts, including their state partners and other partners, are able to develop large corps of high-quality principals who can improve outcomes for students.

What are the key elements of a strong principal pipeline?

In 2011, The Wallace Foundation provided support to six large school districts and their university and state partners to develop comprehensive and aligned principal pipelines. These pipelines combine rigorous standards, high-quality preservice preparation, selective hiring and placement, on-the-job training, and support. An independent study demonstrated that this approach was feasible, affordable, and effective for developing large corps of principals who improve outcomes for students, for teachers, and for their schools.

The findings were tremendously inspiring, but we wanted to make sure this pipeline approach was scalable. In the Principal Pipeline Learning Community, we brought together 84 districts of varying sizes from across the country who did not receive funding from The Wallace Foundation. We sought to learn how they might be able to adapt or adjust the elements of the pipeline frameworks to advance the work in their districts. We paired each district with a consultant to allow them to assess and reimagine the state of the pipeline projects in their current district contexts. We also engaged with Vanderbilt University and Policy Studies Associates to study the effort. What we found was inspiring: There are common pillars that districts of any size can engage in to develop principal pipelines that are built to last.

The first pillar is ensuring strategic alignment through vision and policies, such as making pipelines an explicit part of strategic plans and initiatives. For example, in Newark Public Schools, they embedded principal pipelines into their 10-year strategic plan, which allowed them to secure funding from outside sources through grants as well as to make considerations about reallocating existing funds or resources. In Philadelphia, they developed a leadership pathways framework, which serves as a roadmap for educators as they grow into leadership roles at the school level and beyond.

The second pillar is communicating with clarity and intent through social and organizational awareness. We’re seeing lots of evidence of this in our current work with the Equity-Centered Pipeline Initiative, or ECPI. School district leadership is critical in articulating the commitments of pipeline work. We got to see this in Greenville, South Carolina, where the superintendent dedicated critical staff to lead and implement the pipeline work.

The third pillar for sustainability is aligning institutional elements and supports through people and resources, such as dedicated funding streams and hiring additional personnel to support the facilitation of pipelines as needed. Greenville, again, identified a pipeline leader to act as the hub to coordinate across a variety of departments to ensure there’s coherence.

The last element of sustainability is maintaining priority through culture and stakeholder engagement and evaluation, such as communicating the rationale for the pipeline to members of the school board, to local leaders, as well as setting clear goals and assessing movement toward those goals. There’s great evidence of this in Philadelphia, where the district built university partnerships to ensure principal preparation programs truly reflect the needs of the district, including a goal of diversifying their principal leadership pool so it reflects the student body.

What are the implications of your work for rural schools?

Over the last two years, we’ve been working with three rural districts in Virginia to learn more about the implications for the pipeline strategy in those contexts. The pipeline tends to be significantly smaller, and the way in which our rural partners have been thinking about pipelines is from the perspective of a retention strategy for seated individuals as well as the career trajectory for teachers and teacher leaders who might exist in their districts. We’ve seen these districts invest more in on-the-job support and development for teacher leaders as well as for seated principals.

Our three rural district partners identified key staff internal to the organization who are focused on providing professional learning, coaching, mentoring, and support to principals at varying places in their careers. What we find in these smaller districts is that the principal supervisor—which is one of the key domains in the principal pipeline framework—tends to be the superintendent. Because of the demands of the role of a seated superintendent, their capacity to provide ongoing mentoring, support, and coaching to seated principals and assistant principals is quite complex.

As a result, there is a heightened focus on identifying strategic central office staff who might be able to provide ongoing support to seated folks, then building the capacity of seated principals to develop and support their assistant principals. We hope, inevitably, they will ultimately become the principals who will follow.

How is the principal role changing?

The role of the principal continues to evolve from manager to instructional leader, and we see greater emphasis on the principal as an individual who can shape a school’s climate and culture as well. We’ve begun to think more intentionally about how principals are uniquely positioned to address key factors that advance educational equity. By that, we mean moving our schools and educational systems toward spaces where students can have access to the resources they need to reach their fullest potential.

In 2021, we launched the ECPI to develop more principals who are leading schools for all students. Our larger vision at The Wallace Foundation is that there is a highly effective principal in every school. But through this initiative, our vision is that we have a highly qualified principal in public schools located in areas specifically where students come from families with incomes below the poverty line.

The ECPI is led by eight school districts in partnership with their local community organizations, two university partners, and their state agency. Uniquely, each district defines its vision of equity with input from the community, and they work collaboratively to advance equity-centered leadership within their own local context.

What is the role of state policy in supporting these efforts? Are there examples of state innovation?

I think about the importance of districts being able to lean into their state agency partners: for guidance on the setting of those leadership standards; strategies for recruitment of aspiring principals into the field; approval and oversight of preparation programs, which are evolving alongside the principalship; rethinking how we license our veteran principals so their credentials actually reflect the current state of the role; ongoing support through professional learning approaches at the state level that help reflect the ideas they’d like to see at the local level; and principal evaluation.

We also have seen our state agencies link our school districts with other organizations, including community groups and other state agencies that are grappling with some of the same challenges, as well as professional organizations. For example, within the ECPI, we facilitate a peer learning community of representatives from state agencies that are engaged in this work. Through these convenings, they learn from one another about these issues, such as codifying aligned standards statewide.

State policy can play a role in encouraging and recommending connections between state and local education agencies and higher education to promote the meaningful and ethical use of data sharing. For example, Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools, an ECPI district in North Carolina, has collaborated with the SEA to scale up their Leader Tracking System and dashboard. Through a data-sharing agreement, the district receives critical access to state data that allows principal supervisors, human resources, and the superintendent to access information about aspiring and current school leaders and leverage that information to match principals to schools where their skill sets will have the most impact. A new pilot program enables other school districts to learn from the district and implement similar projects to integrate fragmented state and district data; produce a single, highly relevant dashboard; and ultimately drive informed school leader pipeline decisions.

Over the last three years, Maryland has begun to facilitate aspirant leadership academies that have served as a model for many of its 24 local education agencies. The state-level academies serve assistant principals who are aspiring to the principalship, but they also have an academy that is being leveraged to reignite energy among principals who have been in the seat for a significant time.

This afforded many of Maryland’s districts to transition to a badging system because folks across the country perceive that the next-level work for a principal is typically in a district-level seat. This academy provides an opportunity to encourage retention because we continue to see that the life cycle of a principal is getting shorter and shorter.

What should state boards of education prioritize?

The principalship as we know it is designed for a different era. We are asking our 21st century leaders to lead and operate within a 20th century architecture. That is a mismatch that could cost us high-quality leaders and have implications for students.

It is important to redefine the role before districts and state agencies recruit for it. We are actively working to attract folks to this complex job without addressing the sustainability of that role. The scope of the role of the principal has expanded significantly and drastically to include a focus on student mental health challenges, chronic absenteeism, instructional leadership, and data accountability. That’s why it’s important to think about principal well-being as a larger system issue and consider ways to avoid and address burnout.

Even in this complex time, I would encourage state boards to think about equity and leadership as an explicit competency for their work and not necessarily an aspiration toward the work. We know many states leverage the PSEL standards, where equity is explicitly part of one of the standards, but we avoid it as a part of our principal licensure frameworks and evaluation frameworks. It should reflect the reality of leading in a much more diverse context than we’ve seen before. There is something critically important about culturally responsive practices, community engagement, and disaggregating data as a resource to advance equity.

Maintaining a focus on pipelines but keeping a lens on the larger educational ecosystem is extremely important. There tends to be a focus on preservice preparation while underinvesting in the conditions that keep folks in the seat. Retention is a policy problem. State boards should support and fund mandates for mentorship, which we’ve seen as a feature of many statewide approaches for the first three years. But we should also consider approaches to career lattices that reward instructional growth, sustainability, and staying in the role, not just movement into central office or district-level work.

The role of the principal is evolving much like the role of the teacher is evolving—likely outpacing how quickly we evolve preservice preparation. And when times get tough financially in school districts across the country and there are conversations about what we cut, professional learning is often one of the first things. The fast evolution of these roles and their needs and demands make the case for preserving professional learning. We need the advocacy of our state boards to continue to protect professional learning and perceive it as an essential asset to advancing the positive outcomes we want in our schools.

Are school districts shifting principals away from administrative roles so they can focus on instructional ones?

I see less and less the taking off of things from a principal’s plate, because all things ultimately belong to the principal. But I do see more models where there is a focus on building the capacity of more members of the team to support some of the work that the principal is responsible for.

Are you seeing motion toward adopting portraits of a leader and other frameworks for school leader competencies?

In the ECPI, all eight districts have some form of a portrait of an equity-centered leader. Columbus, Ohio, is a good example. They began their work referring to it as the “portrait of an equity-centered principal,” but they had the a-ha that the competencies and dispositions they wanted to see in principals were the same for all of the leaders in their system.

They leveraged it as a resource for ongoing coaching, support, and mentoring of their school leaders and other district staff. And they are intentional. Principal supervisors and other districts leaders bring that profile of an equity-centered leader when they visit schools, and they either look for specific dispositions in action so they can provide feedback and coaching, or they use it to provide reflections on their observations. It turns on its head this idea connected to evaluation that tends to be negative and really puts an emphasis on ongoing support and feedback that all leaders need.

What makes you optimistic about school leadership?

What’s most inspiring to me right now is that there are more and more eyes on this profession. The field is starting to treat the principalship as significant. I’m also excited to see more and more young people interested in school leadership, and they are coming into this work centering equity as a part of their frame.

Through the work of the ECPI, it’s exciting to see districts move away from this idea that you promote your best teacher to a leadership role and hope for the best. We are beginning to see more genuine, authentically well-designed residency programs; cohort-based academies; and serious, clinical experiences being designed so that leaders who are responsible for so much more are actually arriving ready for the role.

On the support side, there has been a maturation at the school district level to move away from this obsession of selecting the right person for the right school. Districts are beginning to ask, “What does this person need to stay and grow and do their best work here over time?” That is fundamentally a different question, but it is the right question.

People are entering this profession right now, and they are not waiting to be convinced that equity is important. There is something really special about that. There is something we can do as practitioners to support that active interest of folks entering the profession committed to ensuring that more and more children have access to the resources they need. I’m thrilled that I and The Wallace Foundation continue to be a part of that.