Appraising Principal Evaluation and Development: Current Research and Future Directions

• In Event: New Advances in the Preparation, Supervision, and Evaluation of Principals

Abstract

Objective and Perspective. Principals play a critical role in providing high-quality education to K-12 students (e.g., Louis, Leithwood, Wahlstrom, & Anderson, 2010). They influence teaching and learning directly and indirectly through key leadership practices such as allocating instructional resources and influencing pedagogical practices (Newmann, Smith, Allensworth, & Bryk, 2001; Sun, Frank, Penuel, & Kim, 2013). Yet we know little about what school districts can do to improve principal quality.
Principal evaluation is a prominent policy aimed at improving principals’ skills. Spurred by No Child Left Behind (NCLB) waivers and Race To The Top (RTTT), districts and states have invested in evaluation. Simultaneously, funders such as the Wallace Foundation have launched major studies examining how principals are evaluated and supported (e.g., Anderson & Turnbull, 2016). But with few exceptions (e.g., Fuller, Hollingworth, & Liu, 2015), there has been little effort to synthesize what is known about principal evaluation or delineate new research opportunities. The purpose of this paper is to review key findings from research on state and district policies related to principal evaluation and identify directions for future research.
Data and Methods. For this review, we included empirical studies that took place after NCLB waivers and RTTT. Most of the studies analyzed quantitative data (Fuller et al., 2015, Grissom, Blissett, & Mitani, 2016; Henry & Viano, 2015; Herman & Ross, 2016; Kimball, Arrigoni, Clifford, Yoder, & Milanowski, 2015; McCullough, Lipscomb, Chiang, & Gill 2016) while some featured analyses of qualitative data (Anderson & Turnbull, 2016; Goldring, Mavrogordato, & Haynes, 2015; Zepeda, Lanoue, Price, & Jimenez 2014).
Results. Collectively, studies of state principal evaluation policies indicate that in certain settings principals’ leadership practice scores can vary by the measures included in the summative score, principal experience, and students’ socio-economic status. The evidence on the correlation of principals’ component or summative scores with school value-added is mixed. This lends additional support for work that finds that value-added estimates are not valid measures of principal quality (Chiang, Lipscomb, & Gill, 2016; Fuller & Hollingworth, 2014; Grissom, Kalogrides, & Loeb, 2015).
Taken together, studies of district principal evaluation policies suggest that districts have invested in training for principal supervisors and prioritized feedback and in some cases coaching for principals within the context of evaluation. At the same time, this research highlights tensions that can arise when districts implement multiple measure principal evaluation. When measures produce different assessments of principals’ performance, these discrepancies can cause challenges for both superintendents and principals.
Significance. State and district principal evaluation policy is currently a major lever for improving schools and student performance and several studies have investigated evaluation’s relationship with key outcomes. However, much remains unknown about the effectiveness of new principal evaluation policies in the United States. New systems contain flaws/weaknesses that have not been probed, and little research has examined how state policies are interpreted at the district level. And many states and districts are still determining productive ways to assess leadership practice and the degree to which to include student achievement data in this process.

Authors

• Morgaen L. Donaldson, University of Connecticut - Storrs

• Madeline Mavrogordato, Michigan State University

• Peter A. Youngs, University of Virginia

• Shaun Michael Dougherty, Vanderbilt University