Evaluation of principals

Abstract

Lloyd McCleary Department of Educational Administration University of Utah Salt Lake City, Utah E valuation of educational personnel, particularly school principals, is receiving increasing attention due to such immediate influences as pressures for improved administrative performance, need for schools to demonstrate problem solving capability, the performance-based and management-byobjectives movements, and demands for accountability. In addition, two conditions, largely developing during the past ten to fifteen years, underlie the immediate influences noted. The first of these is the increased complexity of the school unit brought about by consolidation and increases in school size, the addition of special programs and technologies, and the impact of social problems. The second condition is due to the gains made in knowledge about the relationship of human needs and organizational effectiveness, about management control systems which employ planning methods to relate personnel performance requirements to goals and to development activities, and about measurement and evaluation as applied to performance assessment. The need for sound, systematic evaluation of administrative performance as a general principle hardly needs treatment, and, if the literature is accurate, is accepted by school administrators as desirable. However, evaluation of the principal in his job is intensely emotional and personal. The evaluation process includes subjective judgments regardless of how objective data collected about his performance might appear. Many underlying assumptions and beliefs need to be made explicit and examined in an atmosphere that is emotionally and psychologically satisfactory, professionally enhancing, and clearly relevant to plans and understandings about personal and organizational needs. Without these conditions an evaluation system, no matter how sound, is likely to have limited if not adverse effects. What appears to be needed is to clarify present knowledge and practice, to examine evaluation processes that take into account the limitations of current capability, and to propose defensible evaluation procedures.