Principals play a crucial role in managing teacher quality, including hiring, developing, and retaining effective staff while also addressing low-performing teachers. Classroom observations and value-added metrics based on student achievement can help identify ineffective teachers, although data suggest that few teachers actually face dismissal. In practice, principals rely on a mix of formal and informal methods to manage teacher effectiveness.
One informal strategy to remove ineffective teachers is known as “counseling out”—an intentional effort to encourage a teacher to leave the school without initiating formal dismissal procedures. A new study by Nat Malkus and Amy Cummings used interview data from a convenience sample of 50 principals across six traditional public school districts in four U.S. states to explore the prevalence and practice of counseling out. The researchers relied on interview data because formal records do not capture counseling out. Interview data were supplemented with district administrative data on teacher mobility, assignment, experience, and evaluations, which provided contextual information, but did not identify whether departures resulted from counseling out.
Several key findings emerged. A whopping 94 percent of principals reported counseling out a teacher at some point. Rather than being an isolated practice, counseling out appeared to be a significant human resource strategy widely used by school leaders.
Administrative data from the 2017–18 school year showed that 283 teachers (14 percent) who taught in the sampled schools that year did not return the following school year. Of these departures, 210 (74 percent) left voluntarily—principals did not report encouraging their departure, 14 (5 percent) were formally dismissed, and 59 (21 percent) were counseled out—principals intentionally encouraged them to leave. Sixty-four percent of principals confirmed that this was representative of the proportion of teachers who were typically counseled out each year.
Clear differences emerged between the evaluation ratings of teachers who were counseled out and those who voluntarily departed. Evaluation ratings for counseled-out teachers more closely resembled those of teachers who were formally dismissed. Through these evaluations, teachers were rated as low-, middle-, or high-performing. Fifty-three percent of counseled-out teachers received a low rating, compared to 22 percent of all departures. In contrast, only 5 percent of teachers who were counseled out had received a high rating, compared to 37 percent of all departures. Both counseled-out and formally dismissed teachers were intentionally removed by their principals, albeit through different mechanisms.
Principals were asked to describe the process they followed when counseling out a teacher. The most common approach was “critical conversations,” which were used to counsel out 61 percent of teachers. This approach involved frank discussions about teachers’ shortcomings and how those shortcomings could jeopardize their employment, while also offering teachers an opportunity to leave without a formal record that could impact their future employment.
Although the administrative data did not provide information on counseled-out teachers’ subsequent employment, principals were asked whether they knew the whereabouts of those who departed in the 2017–18 school year. Generally, principals had limited knowledge of the destinations of teachers formally dismissed, as they were unlikely to discuss future career plans with those they had terminated. However, principals were able to report on 39 percent of counseled-out teachers; among those, approximately half continued teaching in the same district, suggesting some degree of local career continuity. This raises the possibility that counseling-out may shift ineffective teachers to different schools within the same district rather than removing them from the district altogether, potentially redistributing rather than resolving performance concerns.
These findings suggest that counseling out is not merely a last-resort measure, but a widely used tool for maintaining teacher quality and influencing dismissals. Rather than relying exclusively on formal termination policies, counseling out allows principals to remove underperforming teachers while reinforcing the importance of teacher evaluation systems for improving school quality and guiding consequential staffing decisions. This dynamic highlights the tension between both formal and informal policies, as formal policies make it difficult to remove persistently underperforming teachers, leading principals to turn to informal strategies, for better or worse.
SOURCE: Nat Malkus and Amy Cummings, “Turnover Tactics: Unveiling the Frequency and Mechanisms of Counseling Out,” Journal of Education Human Resources, 2026-01, Vol.44 (1), p. 98–123 (February 2026).
