Education is engulfed in an age of accountability and evaluation. Teachers have been subject to several waves of evaluation, first in the 1980s with teacher competency exams, and more recently in efforts to measure effectiveness with value-added measures (or test score gains) plus other mechanisms like teacher observations. States imposed their own test-based accountability systems on schools during the 1990s; then the federal government created its own accountability system in No Child Left Behind, based on state tests but with different consequences. In theory these accountability systems could be used to improve the quality of schooling, but much more often they have served to punish (and only sometimes reward) teachers and schools.
Now accountability and evaluation have spread to principals and other school-level leaders, usually with the understanding that they may be second in importance only to teachers. A small empirical literature has tried to ascertain what specific dimensions of leadership affect student outcomes. Formal methods of evaluating principals have been developed, including the widely-used VALED system from Vanderbilt University and several others. The two national organizations of principals have produced a framework for principal evaluation based on six domains of leadership, and other general frameworks have been developed. Following the lead of teacher evaluation, a few states now require that some part of every administrator’s evaluation be based on student test scores, and some districts are experimenting with the use of test scores to determine salaries or bonuses. Some of these policy efforts are misguided and premature since the difficulties in evaluating principals through test scores are even more difficult than they are for teachers, as we will show in this paper. But there’s no question that evaluating principals is firmly on the agenda of districts and policy-makers.