Principal Formal Evaluation

The goal of this paper is to provide policymakers with recommendations for the design and implementation of strong principal development and evaluation systems. States and local school systems that pursue these ideas can use principal evaluation to drive a powerful vision of principal effectiveness and, by consequence, improve outcomes for all students.

Overview New Leaders has recently published a new principal evaluation model. It includes seven modules: (1) Overview of the New Leaders Principal Evaluation Model, (2) The Principal Evaluation Rubric, (3) Setting a Principal Practice Goal + Strategic Planning, (4) Identifying Evidence, (5) Direct Observation of Principal Practice, (6) Collecting and Mapping Evidence to the Principal Practice Rubric, and (7) Providing Actionable Feedback.

Overview New Leaders has recently published a new principal evaluation model. It includes seven modules: (1) Overview of the New Leaders Principal Evaluation Model, (2) The Principal Evaluation Rubric, (3) Setting a Principal Practice Goal + Strategic Planning, (4) Identifying Evidence, (5) Direct Observation of Principal Practice, (6) Collecting and Mapping Evidence to the Principal Practice Rubric, and (7) Providing Actionable Feedback.

This report analyzes the progress of the districts participated in the Principal Pipeline Initiative sponsored by The Wallace Foundation in implementing the fourth key component, evaluation and support systems aligned with the district-adopted standards for leader. 

This study investigates factors that influence leaders’ reactions to 360° feedback and the relationship of feedback reactions to subsequent development activities and changes in behavior.

This study examines 360° feedback ratings and reactions to feedback, perceptions of feedback accuracy, perceived usefulness of the feedback, and recipients' receptivity to development.

This article examines the effectiveness and related issues of current methods of principal evaluation of teachers.

In a time when public schools continue to be scrutinized, school leadership never mattered more in order to exercise school reform. This qualitative study examined how five principals working in an urban school district perceived their evaluation and how it contributed to their practice.

As the federal government urges states and districts to create principal evaluation systems, largely linked to student achievement, it’s also time that principals be part of the conversation. Without the inclusion of the expertise of school and instructional leaders, the new evaluation systems created across the country may not necessarily be improved or attain desired results, and, as a result, principals may not view feedback from these new evaluation systems as informative for improvement of their practice or their schools.

This report consists of two parts: a survey of 67 public school systems district staff serving as principal supervisors and on-site analysis of six districts pre-service training and support systems for new principals.

This article examines the politics of principal evaluation through both an extensive review of the literature and in-depth interviews with principals and superintendents. The findings reveal that the format and processes used in principal evaluation often vary from one district to another and that principals and superintendents frequently hold different perspectives about the purposes and usefulness of evaluation.

Principal evaluations can be important tools for improving leadership practice, but evaluations have often described by principals and researchers as unsystematic and lacking timely and actionable feedback. This study examines principal perceptions of the Texas Principal Evaluation and Support System.

This report describes how Denver Public Schools hired people to coach and evaluate its principals.

Almost every state in the United States has revamped its principal evaluation policies since 2009, yet we know little about how they are implemented. Based on interviews and document analysis in 21 small- and medium-sized school districts, we found that superintendents’ sense making shaped their implementation of policy.

A growing body of research recognizes the critical role of the school principal, demonstrating that school principals’ effects on student outcomes are second only to those of teachers. Yet policy makers have often paid little attention to principals, choosing instead to focus policy reform on teachers. In the last decade, this pattern has shifted somewhat.

In the past decade, nearly all states have revised their principal evaluation policies, prompting school districts across the country to rethink how they are evaluating school leaders. The new principal evaluation systems that emerge out of these policy reforms often couple increased accountability with a greater emphasis on development in an effort to spur continuous improvement in school leadership practices.

This book shows how principals and other school leaders can develop the skills necessary for teachers to deliver high quality instruction by introducing principals to a five-part model of effective instruction.

This research has profound implications for states and districts implementing principal evaluation systems, particularly those making high-stakes decisions about principals based on statistical estimates of principal effectiveness. Indeed, such statistical estimates should be used not for making judgments or decisions about principals but rather as a screening tool to identify where states and districts should focus more in-depth and accurate strategies to evaluate principal effectiveness.

Recent federal legislation has created strong incentives for states to adopt principal evaluation systems, many of which include new measures of principal effectiveness such as estimates of student growth and changes in school climate. Yet, there has been little research on principal evaluation systems and no state-by-state analysis of the principal evaluation systems adopted at the behest of the legislation.

The role of today's principal is changing, as is the principal workforce. The new generation of principals is younger with less teaching experience, and is more mobile, working more hours, and experiencing more job stress. Understanding how to better prepare new leaders for the role of principal is an urgent policy concern.

This report describes how Denver Public Schools hired personnel to coach and evaluate its principals.

Principal evaluation shares many characteristics with the more general field of personnel evaluation. That is, evaluations may have the purpose of gathering data to help improve performance (formative), or may use the collected information to make decisions about promotion or firing (summative).

Principal supervisors are a potential point of leverage for supporting and developing principals' effectiveness, but little is known about the effectiveness of this approach. The overarching hypothesis of the PSI was that changing the role of principal supervisors from overseeing operations to developing principals' instructional leadership practices could drive improvement in principal effectiveness.

This study present results of a comprehensive review of principal leadership assessment practices in the United States. Using the learning-centered leadership framework, it focused on identifying the congruence (or lack thereof) between documented assessment practices and the research-based criteria for effective leadership that are associated with improved school performance.

With support from The Wallace Foundation, a Vanderbilt University team is developing a tool to monitor and assess the performance of school leaders. The Vanderbilt assessment will differ from existing tools by focusing 100 percent on instructional leadership and examining both principals and leadership teams. The paper, with two companion reports, presents the research behind and conceptual framework for the tool.

An analysis by The New York Times of the city’s signature report-card system shows that schools run by graduates of the celebrated New York City Leadership Academy — which the mayor created and helped raise more than $80 million for — have not done as well as those led by experienced principals or new principals who came through traditional routes.

Teacher effectiveness varies substantially, yet principals’ evaluations of teachers often fail to differentiate performance among teachers. We offer new evidence on principals’ subjective evaluations of their teachers’ effectiveness using two sources of data from a large, urban district: principals’ high-stakes personnel evaluations of teachers, and their low-stakes assessments of a subsample of those teachers provided to the researchers.

Numerous studies investigate high-stakes personnel evaluation systems in education, but nearly all focus on evaluation of teachers. The authors instead examine the evaluation of school principals at scale using data from the first 4 years of implementation of Tennessee’s multiple-measure administrator evaluation system. 

this article identifies multiple conceptual approaches for capturing the contributions of principals to student test score growth, develops empirical models to reflect these approaches, examines the properties of these models, and compares the results of the models empirically using data from a large urban school district.

This article presents results from a study that examined the instructional management behavior of 10 elementary school principals in a single school district. The primary goal of the research was to describe the instructional management behavior of these principals in terms of specific job behaviors.

States and districts across the country are implementing new principal evaluation systems that include measures of the quality of principals' school leadership practices and measures of student achievement growth. Because these evaluation systems will be used for high- stakes decisions, it is important that the component measures of the evaluation systems fairly and accurately differentiate between effective and ineffective principals.

This paper examines how well principals can distinguish between more and less effective teachers. To put principal evaluations in context, we compare them with the traditional determinants of teacher compensation-education and experience-as well as value-added measures of teacher effectiveness.

In recent years, educators and policymakers have agreed that principals are critical to school success and have repeatedly pointed out the need to aggressively recruit and select highly qualified candidates. Surprisingly, however, the evaluation of principals has attracted much less interest. Recent policy documents on school leadership have largely ignored the topic, and the empirical research base is very thin.

New Leaders has recently published a new principal evaluation model. It includes seven modules: (1) Overview of the New Leaders Principal Evaluation Model, (2) The Principal Evaluation Rubric, (3) Setting a Principal Practice Goal + Strategic Planning, (4) Identifying Evidence, (5) Direct Observation of Principal Practice, (6) Collecting and Mapping Evidence to the Principal Practice Rubric, and (7) Providing Actionable Feedback.

This paper focuses on two questions: (a) What patterns in certification currently exist across the states? and (b) What might these current patterns indicate for the future of school principal certification?

States and districts across the country are revising how they evaluate school principals. Those that are doing so face a substantial challenge: there is scant evidence on the validity and reliability of current principal evaluation tools. Pennsylvania is among states that are developing a new tool for evaluating principals and assistant principals.

This paper describe four essential elements of effective principals: principal standards, high-quality training, selective hiring, and a combination of solid on-the-job support and performance evaluation, especially for new hires.

Under new frameworks, districts have better aligned their evaluations with their school-leadership standards and developed nuanced rubrics for evidence-collection and evaluation ratings. They have also altered the role of principal supervisors so that they spend more time in schools working with principals.

This book presents information and tools necessary to successfully evaluate all types of educational leaders and improve both individual and organizational performance.

Education created RTT under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 to provide incentives for states to reform K-12 education in areas such as improving the lowest performing schools and developing effective teachers and leaders. In 2010, Education awarded 12 states nearly $4 billion in RTT grant funds to spend over 4 years. A state's RTT application and scope of work included the state's plans for development and
implementation of teacher and principal evaluation systems by participating school districts

New research has found essentially no positive correlation between how would-be principals perform on a widely used licensure exam and their success as school leaders.

The T-PESS process incorporates a series of actions and activities that should be applied on an ongoing basis. While the T-PESS process results in your annual summary assessment, it's better to think of it as an annual process of activities that help you self-assess, establish performance goals, collect and analyze information, and provide constructive feedback, improving your quality and effectiveness as the school leader.

This article examines the outcomes that organizations can expect from using 360 evaluation systems and provides recommendations for implementing these feedback methods to better ensure improvements will be realized.

This report represents the first systematic comparison of student outcomes in schools led by the Aspiring Principals Program (APP) graduates after three years to those in comparable schools led by other new principals.

The article examines the tensions one superintendent in the USA experienced as he evaluated principals in a high-stakes environment that had undergone numerous transformations at the central office. Using qualitative methods, primarily, shadowing techniques, observations and debriefing, the following tensions emerged and were examined in light of the work of the superintendent evaluating principal performance.