Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Policy initiatives aimed at school accountability have spurred the introduction of new evaluation systems for both teachers and principals in recent years. Although a growing body of research examines the properties of evaluation systems for teachers, little attention has been paid to systems for evaluating principal performance. In this study, we make use of data from the first four years of implementation of principal evaluation under the Tennessee Educator Accelerator Model (TEAM), a comprehensive evaluation system initiated as part of Tennessee’s Race to the Top reforms. We focus specifically on the scores principals receive from supervisors or other leaders on a standards-based rubric, which constitute one-half of the overall evaluation score. We first ask what the properties of these scores are and how they vary according to principal and school characteristics. We then test whether the scores predict other policy-relevant outcomes, including teachers’ and assistant principals’ low-stakes assessments of leadership in their schools, teacher turnover, and school value-added scores. We document that some principal and school characteristics are systematic predictors of supervisors’ ratings of their performance. In particular, more experienced principals and principals in schools with smaller populations of low-income students are rated higher, on average. Furthermore, although we find that principals’ ratings do not reliably differentiate among the different domains of school leadership defined by the rubric, aggregate supervisor ratings generally are positively associated with other plausible measures of principal job performance, including teachers’ and APs’ ratings of school leadership quality, the states’ school value-added measures, and other measures of student test score growth.