Privacy-friendly analytics help us see which jobs people explore. They stay off unless you agree.Analytics off unless you agree. Details

Read the record
Back to the river
Skip to sources
Time Machine

School principals

Official title Education Administrators, Kindergarten through Secondary (SOC 11-9032)

Also called Elementary school principal, Middle school principal, High school principal, Assistant principal, Vice principal

In brief

In May 2025, BLS counted 328,330 US school principals, with median pay of $105,870 a year. Of the BLS counts since 2021, the May 2025 count is the highest. The earliest figure here is an estimate of 7,000 from 1870, not measured the same way as today's count. The last full technology era for school principals: Personal computer, 1983 to 2002.

What the sources say

Official outlook

BLS projects little or no change in employment from 2025 to 2035 (-0.3%).

BLS Employment Projections 2025-35

AI exposure studies

Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. BLS publishes these counts as yearly survey snapshots and cautions against reading them as a precise trend.

Last updated .

Cite this page
APA

Future History. (2026, October 11). School principals: jobs and pay since 1870 [Data set; data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35]. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/11-9032

Chicago

Future History. "School principals: jobs and pay since 1870." Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. Last modified October 11, 2026. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/11-9032.

BibTeX

@misc{futurehistory_11_9032, author = {{Future History}}, title = {School principals: jobs and pay since 1870}, year = {2026}, month = oct, howpublished = {\url{https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/11-9032}}, note = {Last updated 2026-10-11. Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35}, }

The access date is today's date on your device.

drag to travel through time
1850187519001925195019752000now
Country
2026
Known then as Superintendent of Common Schools / Head Teacher (urban district era)
Known then as Principal Teacher / Building Principal (teaching-principal era)
Known then as School Principal / Supervising Principal (full-time administrative era)
Known then as School Principal / Principal (federal funding accountability era)
Known then as Education Administrators, Kindergarten through Secondary (BLS SOC 11-9032)
Known today as Education Administrators, Kindergarten through Secondary (BLS SOC 11-9032)
Projected to still be called Education Administrators, Kindergarten through Secondary (BLS SOC 11-9032)
Data from the May 2025 survey
US Employment
328K
Est.

Stated in source: BLS OEWS

Official statistic
Report an error
Median Annual Wage
$105,870
Est.

≈ $103,156 in 2024 prices (derived by us, CPI-adjusted)

Official statistic
Report an error
Beat · 1837

June 9, 1837: Buffalo, New York becomes the first city in the United States to formally appoint a superintendent of common schools. R. W. Haskins received notice of his appointment on January 10, 1837, but found the authorizing law defective and resigned before completing the year. Oliver Gray Steele (1805-1879) succeeded him and served three terms between 1838 and 1852, becoming known as the father of Buffalo public schools. Louisville, Kentucky made a parallel appointment on July 31, 1837. These two cities mark the institutional birth of the K-12 administrator as a distinct occupational identity.

Beat · 1858

Cincinnati school board members note in their 1858 annual report that although principals "till the last two years" were "only teachers of the highest classes of their respective schools," their new supervisory responsibilities now required them to have small offices "where they keep records, examine classes, and transact the general business of the school." This passage documents the precise moment when the principal's role diverged from classroom teaching. The principal's office as an architectural and institutional fact was being invented in northeastern cities between 1850 and 1865; by the 1870s it was standard in graded urban schools.

Beat · 1900

By 1900, women ran more than two-thirds of the nation's elementary schools. Female principals were the majority of building administrators in elementary education from the 1900s through the 1950s. This reversed sharply after World War II: male veterans returning to civilian employment combined with higher education requirements (most states required master's degrees for principal certification by the 1960s) reduced women to 13 percent of elementary principals and under 2 percent of high school principals by the early 1970s. The pattern reversed again after the Title IX era; by 2020-21, women made up 56 percent of all public school principals.

Beat · 1954

The 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision mandating school desegregation had a devastating and largely undocumented effect on the principal workforce: Southern states demoted and fired Black educators by the thousands as segregated schools were closed or merged. Research has documented approximately a 90 percent decline in the number of Black principals in the South in the years following Brown. These administrators were disproportionately high school principals who had built institutions of academic excellence under segregation, including Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C. Many were replaced by white administrators as integration proceeded. The Black principal workforce in the South did not recover to its pre-Brown levels until the late 20th century.

Beat · 1983

The National Commission on Excellence in Education publishes "A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform" on April 26, 1983. The report declares the American education system threatened by "a rising tide of mediocrity" and argues this poses a national security threat. It catalyzes the modern standards-and-accountability era: within a decade, every US state had adopted formal curriculum standards and most required standardized testing tied to school accountability. For school principals, "A Nation at Risk" is the inflection point from instructional leader to compliance officer: the percentage of principal time devoted to data reporting, test administration management, and regulatory documentation climbed sharply through the 1980s and 1990s and would accelerate further under NCLB in 2002.

Beat · 1996

The Council of Chief State School Officers publishes the Interstate School Leaders Licensure Consortium (ISLLC) Standards in 1996, the first nationally adopted professional standards for school principals and superintendents. The standards articulate six domains of effective school leadership: shared vision, school culture, management, family and community engagement, integrity and ethics, and the broader social context. The ISLLC Standards were revised and renamed the Professional Standards for Educational Leaders (PSEL) in 2015. Their publication marked the professionalizing moment when school administration gained a nationally codified competency framework analogous to the bar exam for lawyers or board certification in medicine.

Beat · 2002

No Child Left Behind is signed into law on January 8, 2002. It requires annual standardized testing of all students in grades 3-8 and once in high school, public disaggregation of results by subgroup (race, poverty, disability, English-learner status), and escalating federal sanctions for schools that fail to demonstrate Adequate Yearly Progress. Building principals become the primary accountability officers for AYP compliance in their buildings. The CSBA notes that NCLB "revolutionized national student data collection," requiring principals to become fluent data analysts and creating a rapidly expanding market for student information systems capable of real-time disaggregated reporting.

How to read this number

OEWS is a point-in-time survey snapshot, not a continuous time series; BLS advises against using it for year-over-year trend comparison.

Each dot is a cited figure over time; the dotted line only links them (values between aren't measured). Hollow dots are estimates.

Official statistic: Copied by a script from a statistics agency table or a published study's table, not retyped by hand. BLS figures and the forecast and exposure tables are also re-checked against that table on every data run. Researched context: Researched from the cited source rather than copied from it by a script, so it is not machine-checked yet. Spot a mistake? Each figure has a “Report an error” link.

Cited forecasts · present → 2035

Will AI replace school principals? What the research says

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, we show the disagreement rather than an average.

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, the spread is the honest signal.

What published forecasts say
Forecast change in the number of people doing this work, as published by each named source. Bars share one scale on every role, centred on zero and reaching the end at ±30%. Grey marks a small change, 3% or less either way.
BLS Employment Projections 2025-35
→ 2035
-0.3%
BLS National Employment Matrix, 2025-35 cycle, line for SOC 11-9032 (Education administrators, kindergarten through secondary): 343.8 thousand jobs in 2025, projected 342.7 thousand in 2035, a change of -1.2 thousand (-0.3%). Matrix employment counts all jobs in the occupation, including self-employed workers (1.4% of this occupation in 2025). The average for all occupations in this cycle is +3.5%.
Official statisticReport an error
How exposed is this work to AI (research measures)
Scores as published by each study. Each row says what it measures. These measure what AI could technically do, not forecasts of jobs lost.
Eloundou et al. (2023), "GPTs are GPTs"
2023 study · Share of tasks exposed to LLMs (β, human-rated)
45.5%
of tasks
What this measures

Published occupation-level exposure from the paper's occ_level.csv for O*NET-SOC 11-9032.00 Education Administrators, Kindergarten through Secondary. Shown: human-rated β = 0.455, the share of the occupation's tasks an LLM could do in at least half the time at equal quality, counting tasks that need LLM-powered software at half weight (β = E1 + 0.5 × E2). Other published measures for this occupation: human-rated α (LLM alone) 0.273 and γ (all LLM-assisted) 0.636; GPT-4-rated β 0.418. This measures how much of the work an LLM could touch, not how many jobs disappear.

Official statisticReport an error
Today, in this role

What's changing day to day for school principals

Three parts of your work where AI is already doing real lifting, and what stays yours.

AI is sitting alongside you hereManage school-to-family communications (drafting and distributing newsletters, emergency alerts, parent meeting agendas, and policy updates via ParentSquare AI multilingual mass communication platform, which automatically translates outreach into 100+ languages and optimizes delivery timing by family communication preference) a task that previously required a bilingual staff member or external translation service.

Manage school-to-family communications (drafting and distributing newsletters, emergency alerts, parent meeting agendas, and policy updates via ParentSquare AI multilingual mass communication platform, which automatically translates outreach into 100+ languages and optimizes delivery timing by family communication preference) a task that previously required a bilingual staff member or external translation service.[10],[11]

Tools picking this up
Where your edge is

ParentSquare handles the translation, formatting, and delivery logistics of mass school communications automatically, including two-way messaging in families' home languages without staff translator overhead. Invest your communication energy in the messages that require your voice specifically: the call home about a student in crisis, the community forum where you explain a difficult school policy decision to skeptical parents, the in-person relationship with the family whose child is chronically absent. High-volume informational communication is now largely automated; your human-communication capital should be deployed on the relationships that require your personal credibility.

AI is sitting alongside you hereMonitor and intervene on chronic absenteeism and attendance patterns, reviewing PowerSchool AI attendance analytics for early-warning flags on students approaching truancy thresholds, triggering automated parent outreach sequences, and personally following up on cases where automated outreach has not resolved attendance barriers (housing instability, transportation, health, or family factors that require a human relationship to address).

Monitor and intervene on chronic absenteeism and attendance patterns, reviewing PowerSchool AI attendance analytics for early-warning flags on students approaching truancy thresholds, triggering automated parent outreach sequences, and personally following up on cases where automated outreach has not resolved attendance barriers (housing instability, transportation, health, or family factors that require a human relationship to address).[12],[7]

Tools picking this up
Where your edge is

PowerSchool AI identifies chronic-absenteeism trajectories and triggers parent notification automation: the manual tracking and letter-sending that previously required registrar and attendance secretary time. The cases where automation fails are exactly the students whose barriers require your personal attention: the family in a housing crisis, the student with untreated anxiety, the parent who doesn't trust the district. Develop a tiered intervention protocol where AI handles Tier 1 outreach and you personally engage the Tier 2 and a few cases where a relationship-based intervention is the only thing that actually changes the behavior.

AI is sitting alongside you herePlan and lead professional development for teaching staff: using MagicSchool AI to generate professional learning session agendas and differentiated content tracks, leveraging NWEA MAP Growth AI analytics to identify school-wide instructional gaps that should anchor PD themes, and designing the in-person facilitation and coaching cycles that make PD stick rather than fade after the session ends.

Plan and lead professional development for teaching staff: using MagicSchool AI to generate professional learning session agendas and differentiated content tracks, leveraging NWEA MAP Growth AI analytics to identify school-wide instructional gaps that should anchor PD themes, and designing the in-person facilitation and coaching cycles that make PD stick rather than fade after the session ends.[9],[13]

Where your edge is

AI compresses PD planning logistics significantly: MagicSchool AI drafts a full-day workshop agenda from a learning objective prompt; NWEA MAP's school-level growth analytics identify the specific instructional gaps (e.g., math fact fluency in grades 3-4, argumentative writing in grades 7-8) that should anchor the PD theme. The principal's irreplaceable role is in the culture-of-learning work: creating the psychological safety where teachers feel comfortable examining their own practice, designing the coaching cycles that transfer PD learning into classrooms, and modeling the learner stance that makes a school a learning organization rather than a compliance organization.

Where school principals go next

Natural next steps for someone with your foundation: not exits, evolutions.

What each move takes

A direction you could grow

Education Administrators, Postsecondary

K-12 school leaders (particularly superintendents and district-level administrators with academic affairs, curriculum, or student services portfolios) have transferable credentials for community college and regional university administrative roles. The K-12 accountability experience (IDEA compliance, FERPA governance, budget management, community relations, instructional supervision) overlaps substantially with postsecondary student-affairs and academic-affairs administration. The 2025-2026 wave of AI policy governance, both K-12 and higher education are building acceptable-use frameworks simultaneously, has increased demand for administrators who can bridge both sectors. Education Week (2026) reports growing cross-sector movement as community colleges prioritize administrators with K-12 MTSS and dual-enrollment program management experience for student-success roles. The CRI delta is slightly negative because postsecondary administration scores slightly lower on composite resilience, primarily due to more extensive administrative transaction automation at the college level.

What you'd add
  • · Higher education governance: SACSCOC/HLC accreditation standards, faculty shared governance, and academic senate relations distinct from K-12 board governance
  • · Postsecondary enrollment management: understanding FAFSA, Title IV financial aid, and enrollment funnel management, absent in K-12 context
  • · College student development theory (Chickering, Baxter Magolda) vs. K-12 developmental frameworks
  • · Grant writing for higher-ed funding sources: Title III, NSF HSI supplements, Perkins CTE postsecondary funding
  • · Collective bargaining in unionized community college environments: AFSCME and AFT faculty contract administration differs from K-12 union frameworks
What it takesSome new skills to pick up
Tools of the era

How has the work of school principals changed since 1837?

The tools that defined the work, one line per era. Select an era to see how it reshaped the work.

  • Ledger, blackboard, and oral examination (pre-administrative era)

    The earliest school administrators worked entirely with pen, ledger, and blackboard. Enrollment was recorded in handwritten registers; teacher assignments were made by the board of trustees and posted via written circular; examinations were conducted orally before the principal, board members, and parents. Communication between a principal and the district office traveled by mail or personal visit. The administrative load was light because the role barely existed as distinct from teaching: the "principal teacher" in Cincinnati in 1858 was first and foremost a classroom teacher who also unlocked the building and settled disputes. There was no administrative technology because there was almost no administrative function yet.

  • Typewriter, telephone, and standardized cumulative record (scientific management era)

    The typewriter entered school offices in the 1900s-1910s alongside a broader shift toward "scientific management" of school systems promoted by Ellwood P. Cubberley and other early 20th-century education reformers. Cubberley's 1916 book "Public School Administration" framed the superintendent as a corporate executive and the building principal as a middle manager, and recommended that schools keep standardized cumulative pupil records: typed files that followed each student from grade to grade and documented attendance, grades, health screenings, and "character" assessments. The telephone allowed the principal to contact the district office and parents without writing a letter or sending a messenger. These tools made the principal's job larger: where the 1880s head teacher supervised a few teachers informally, the 1930s principal supervised several teachers with formal observation protocols, typed reports, and telephone accountability.

    Effect on the work

    The administrative infrastructure of the scientific-management era expanded the principal workforce: NCES data shows the number of building administrators growing substantially faster than teacher counts between 1900 and 1950 as districts created formal supervisory layers.

  • Mimeograph, photocopier, and standardized testing infrastructure (mass-communications era)

    The mimeograph machine, originally developed by Thomas Edison, became ubiquitous in school offices by the 1950s-1960s, allowing principals to produce newsletters, policy notices, and tests at scale for the first time. The Xerox photocopier arrived in schools in the 1960s and eventually displaced the mimeograph. Simultaneously, standardized testing expanded dramatically: the SAT had been administered since 1926 but college entrance testing reached mass scale in the 1960s; statewide norm-referenced achievement tests proliferated after the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA, 1965) tied federal funding to documented student outcomes for the first time. The principal's role in managing test administration, communicating results to parents, and reporting to the district office added a new administrative layer that would grow substantially in the following decades.

  • Personal computer, student information systems, and standards-based accountability (A Nation at Risk era)

    "A Nation at Risk," published April 26, 1983 by the National Commission on Excellence in Education, declared that the United States was threatened by "a rising tide of mediocrity" and demanded stronger graduation requirements, more homework, longer school years, and greater accountability at all levels. The report launched the modern standards-and-accountability era. For building principals, it meant two converging changes: first, personal computers arrived in school offices in the mid-1980s (IBM PC launched 1981; Apple IIe was the school computing standard by 1983), enabling the first generation of electronic student information systems; second, state governments began mandating annual standardized assessments and publishing school report cards, creating a data-reporting function that the principal's office now had to manage. By 1990 most US school districts ran some form of SIS software for attendance and grade tracking, though interoperability was minimal and systems were highly fragmented by vendor and district.

    Effect on the work

    The A Nation at Risk accountability wave and subsequent state standards movements of the 1980s-1990s contributed to the expansion of assistant principal positions in secondary schools, as the compliance and discipline management load grew faster than a single administrator could handle.

  • No Child Left Behind data infrastructure: AYP, testing mandates, and data disaggregation (compliance era)

    No Child Left Behind, signed January 8, 2002, required every public school to test every student in grades 3-8 and once in high school in reading and math, disaggregate results by race, poverty, disability, and English-learner status, and demonstrate Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) toward full proficiency by 2014. Schools that failed to meet AYP faced escalating sanctions including restructuring and state takeover. For building principals, NCLB did not just add paperwork: it fundamentally changed the job description. A principal now needed to be a data analyst, a compliance officer, an AYP strategist, and a test-prep manager simultaneously. The education technology market responded: companies including PowerSchool (founded 1997, acquired by Apple in 2001, then re-spun) built modern SIS platforms tailored to the NCLB reporting architecture, with dashboards that let principals track AYP-eligible subgroup performance in near-real time.

    Effect on the work

    NCLB drove growth in the assistant principal workforce as secondary schools added administrators specifically to handle the discipline, attendance, and compliance functions freed up so the building principal could focus on instructional accountability. NCES data shows combined principals-and-assistant-principals in public schools growing between 2000 and 2008.

  • ESSA, cloud SIS, and multi-tiered support platforms (instructional leadership renaissance era)

    The Every Student Succeeds Act, signed December 10, 2015, returned most accountability and testing design decisions from the federal government to the states, reducing the NCLB-era compliance burden while explicitly investing in principal quality for the first time (Title II funding for principal preparation and professional development). ESSA recognized school principals as a named target of federal improvement investment, something NCLB had not done. Multi-tiered system of support (MTSS) platforms including Panorama Education and Branching Minds gave principals real-time early-warning data on at-risk students, compressing the manual data-pull that had previously consumed instructional coach and administrative time.

  • AI administrative tools for school leaders: MagicSchool AI, PowerSchool AI, ParentSquare, GoGuardian Beacon

    Starting in 2023, a wave of AI tools reached school administrators with productivity claims that were, for once, backed by measurable outcomes. RAND's 2025 survey of K-12 principals found that those using AI tools for administrative writing and communication reported saving several hours per week, primarily through automated drafting of teacher observation summaries, parent communications, and policy documents (MagicSchool AI for Administrators), AI-powered chronic-absenteeism alerts (PowerSchool AI), and multilingual parent outreach in languages without a human translator (ParentSquare). The functions being automated were the highest-volume, lowest-discretion parts of the job. The functions that remained irreducibly human, and that define the role's long-term durability, are statutory: serving as the Local Educational Agency representative in IEP meetings (required by IDEA 2004), Title IX coordinator accountability, FERPA data governance, and student threat assessment. No AI system can be authorized to commit district resources in an IEP meeting or make a threat assessment call in the hallway at 7:45 AM.

    Effect on the work

    The RAND 2025 survey documents AI time savings of several hours per week for principals using administrative AI tools, but does not find evidence of reduced hiring or position elimination. The pattern is augmentation rather than substitution: AI compresses the paperwork layer, recovering time for the relational and statutory work that defines the role's irreplaceable core.

Part of Management · see all 36 roles →
Different role?

See the same long-arc view for your own profession.

Browse the directory by industry, or search by title or SOC code.

Browse all roles

Education Administrators, Kindergarten through Secondary employment and pay by year

On record since1837
Latest US employment328,330 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Latest US median pay$105,870 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Outlook-0.3% by 2035Source: BLS Employment Projections 2025-35Official statisticReport an error

In other countries

The latest figure each country's statistics agency publishes for this job. Each uses its own occupation definition, survey basis and currency, so the numbers are not directly comparable with each other or with the US figures.

  • Canada (NOC 40021)

    Employment, 2020
    31,570, Statistics Canada Census 2021 Official statistic Report an errorStatistics Canada Census of Population 2021: number of persons with employment income in NOC 40021 School principals and administrators of elementary and secondary education, Canada, reference year 2020. A recipients basis (anyone with employment income during the year), slightly broader than a point-in-time employed count. Statistics Canada Open Licence.
    Median pay, 2020
    C$115,000, Statistics Canada Census 2021 Official statistic Report an errorStatistics Canada Census of Population 2021 (Table 98-10-0586): median employment income for NOC 40021 School principals and administrators of elementary and secondary education, Canada, reference year 2020, full-year full-time workers (the basis comparable to the US OEWS full-time median). Statistics Canada Open Licence.
View all 29 years of cited US data, each linked to its source
YearUS employmentAnnual pay (median unless marked)SourceReport
18707,000n/aEst., NCES Researched contextReport
190030,000n/aEst., US Bureau of the Census (1900) Researched contextReport
1950n/a$4,200Est., University of Missouri Libraries Researched contextReport
1970100,000n/aEst., National Center for Education Statistics Researched contextReport
1987105,000n/aEst., NCES 97-455 Researched contextReport
1993n/a$54,857NCES Researched contextReport
2003206,310$73,490BLS OEWS May 2003 Official statisticReport
2004209,630$74,190BLS OEWS May 2004 Official statisticReport
2005213,250$75,400BLS OEWS May 2005 Official statisticReport
2006215,630$77,740BLS OEWS May 2006 Official statisticReport
2007218,820$80,580BLS OEWS May 2007 Official statisticReport
2008219,100$83,880BLS OEWS May 2008 Official statisticReport
2009219,280$85,220BLS OEWS May 2009 Official statisticReport
2010222,270$86,970BLS OEWS May 2010 Official statisticReport
2011222,810$87,470BLS OEWS May 2011 Official statisticReport
2012225,970$87,760BLS OEWS May 2012 Official statisticReport
2013226,760$88,380BLS OEWS May 2013 Official statisticReport
2014231,800$89,540BLS OEWS May 2014 Official statisticReport
2015235,110$90,410BLS OEWS May 2015 Official statisticReport
2016242,970$92,510BLS OEWS May 2016 Official statisticReport
2017250,280$94,390BLS OEWS May 2017 Official statisticReport
2018263,120$95,310BLS OEWS May 2018 Official statisticReport
2019271,020$96,400BLS OEWS May 2019 Official statisticReport
2020262,480$98,490BLS OEWS May 2020 Official statisticReport
2021274,710$98,420BLS OEWS May 2021 Official statisticReport
2022285,910$101,320BLS OEWS May 2022 Official statisticReport
2023302,580$103,460BLS OEWS May 2023 Official statisticReport
2024319,630$104,070BLS OEWS May 2024 Official statisticReport
2025328,330$105,870BLS OEWS May 2025 Official statisticReport
Embed this timeline on your site

Free for any site. Paste this where the timeline should appear; it stays interactive, every datapoint stays cited, and it sets no cookies on your page. How embedding works

<iframe src="https://futurehistory.earth/embed/11-9032"
  width="100%" height="430" style="border:0"
  title="Education Administrators, Kindergarten through Secondary, a Future History timeline"
  loading="lazy"></iframe>
<p style="font-size:13px;margin:4px 0 0"><a href="https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/11-9032">Education Administrators, Kindergarten through Secondary: jobs and pay over time</a>, from Future History</p>

See all roles in Management