What is Sustainment Principal

Since the start of the United States' No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 (NCLB), and now the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), schools that underperform have been under significant pressure to improve academic achievement. The responsibility for such improvement is placed on school leadership, namely school principals. The endeavor of school improvement takes on many forms since the process varies from one U.S. state to another, meaning that school “turnaround” is becoming a specialization within the work that a principal is already expected to perform. Principals of underperforming schools must therefore familiarize themselves with the specialized roles and responsibilities of the “turnaround principal” to yield results in their own schools. This case study takes a human performance technology approach to understand how one school successfully improved on-time graduation rates (i.e., within four years) by bringing a turnaround principal on board, then later sustaining results by hiring a permanent sustainment principal.