By Gail Connelly
Principal, September/October 2011

How am I doing?

Ed Koch, the gregarious former mayor of New York City, often stopped people on the street to pose this single question. He’d get an earful about the issues that mattered to average New Yorkers, which helped him better understand the expectations and aspirations of nearly 7 million people. Getting helpful answers depends on asking the right questions.

We all want to know “how we’re doing” in our professional lives. Unfortunately, however, we don’t always get helpful answers to the right questions. This is particularly true for many K-8 principals, according to two nationally renowned education researchers, Matthew Clifford, senior research scientist, American Institutes for Research, and Steven Ross, professor of education, Center for Research and Reform in Education, Johns Hopkins University. Clifford and Ross recently conducted a scan of the current research on this topic, which they summarized in Designing Principal Evaluation Systems: Research to Guide Decision-Making, produced in collaboration with NAESP. (See the summary at www.naesp.org/evaluation.)

Principal-evaluation practices hold great promise for enhancing the capacity of principals and improving schools, Clifford and Ross say, but the research raises serious concerns about the consistency, fairness, and value of such practices. In other words, we’re not asking the right questions to evaluate principals, so we’re not getting answers that strengthen principals’ capacity, and as a result, we’re overlooking proven strategies for improving schools.

Clearly, principals need better evaluation systems. Consequently, NAESP is partnering with our colleagues at the National Association of Secondary School Principals on a project to convene a broad coalition of stakeholders to develop comprehensive guidelines that are research-based and practitioner-informed. Our ultimate goals are to guide state and district practices, inform federal and state policy, and link evaluation to professional development necessary for building the capacity of principals.

This initiative rests on two of NAESP’s bedrock values:

• A great teacher can create a great classroom, but only a principal can create and sustain a great school.
• Principal-evaluation processes must be tied to professional development and used as carrots to encourage principal and school improvement, not sticks to threaten or reprimand so-called recalcitrant employees.

Our project also builds on two of NAESP’s landmark works.

NAESP’s professional standards handbook, Leading Learning Communities: What Principals Should Know and Be Able to Do, serves as a blueprint for thousands of principals who strive to align their complex work with these rigorous standards. Yet the research analyzed by Clifford and Ross indicates that NAESP’s standards—and those developed by other organizations—are not factors in most formal evaluation processes. We believe this discrepancy signals that principals are very demanding of themselves—maybe more so than their evaluation processes. To help close this gap, Leading Learning Communities will inform our work on evaluation at every step of the way.

The Association’s 10-year study on the principalship (research NAESP has conducted once a decade since 1928) yields interesting insight about the state of principal evaluation. Consider this information from our most recent study, conducted in 2008:

• Nearly 8 percent of principals are rarely or never evaluated. This number is too high. Every principal needs and deserves to be evaluated to grow professionally.
• Two-thirds of principals say that student performance is taken into account in evaluations. The question is, how are we measuring students? If students are being evaluated appropriately, using multiple measures that track achievement across a broad curriculum or for an entire school year, then by all means, include student performance as a factor in principal evaluation. If students are evaluated against a single snapshot of a standardized test score, however, everyone loses—students, educators, and the nation as a whole.
• Only 30 percent of principals are asked for feedback on their own evaluations. To be truly valuable, individual principal evaluations and evaluation systems must be informed by principals.

And my final point about principal evaluation is related to the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). NAESP believes that the reauthorization of ESEA must recognize the core competencies of principals. We’re fighting to ensure that fair, objective, and comprehensive principal evaluation systems are based on those core competencies. Here’s my question to you:

Does our initial work on principal evaluation frame the issues in a way that will support your capacity to improve your school? Or more simply put: How are we doing? Send me your thoughts at executivedirector@naesp.org.

Gail Connelly is executive director of NAESP.

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