Wallace commissioned market research to help the foundation and others communicate effectively about pipelines. The idea was to understand how state and local education decision-makers view principals, what benefits of pipelines were most important to them, and what barriers they viewed to putting pipelines in place.

This slide deck summarizes key findings from that research, which entailed detailed interviews in summer and fall 2019 with 36 education decision-makers—evenly divided among state education officials as well as district superintendents and school board members in medium to large school districts. 

Interviewees were all made familiar with a basic description of the pipeline approach as consisting of actions including developing leader standards; providing strong pre-service principal training; using selective hiring procedures; and aligning apt on-the-job support and evaluation of principals—and then asked for their reaction.