Student test scores a reliable measure of principal performance?
 

Tennessee, Florida, and Louisiana have linked hiring, promotion, and dismissal of principals to student test scores.  A recent paper in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis modeled three approaches to assessing principal performance through student test measures and compared these with each other and against non-test methods.
 

Approach one: school effectiveness. This method takes a simple measure of school effectiveness and attributes this performance to the principal. Drawbacks of this approach include that it does not account for factors such as neighborhood effects, student backgrounds, and the legacy of previous leaders.
 

Approach two: relative within-school effectiveness. This method compares school effectiveness under different principals. It has the advantage of accounting for neighborhood effects, but it does not reflect changes in challenges over time and can only be used where schools have data for more than one principal.

Approach three: school improvement. This method measures school improvement between years. Unlike methods one and two, this does not assume that principal performance is reflected immediately in student scores. A main difficulty of this method is that it requires a principal to serve enough time to enable multiple-year comparisons.
 

The researchers analyzed data on 523 principals in Florida public schools from 2003 to 2011. The three methods provided different results (particularly method three, which rarely correlated with the other two). Compared against non-test school outcome measures, method one showed the best correlation and method three was negatively correlated. 

Johns Hopkins University 

Research in Brief

News Blast