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Association of District Principal Evaluation with learning-centered leadership practice: Evidence from Michigan and Beijing

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Abstract

Principal evaluation has become a key component of national policy debates on developing effective leaders. To contribute to these debates, this study draws on survey data to explore how principals in Michigan and metropolitan Beijing behaved differently in enacting leadership related to teaching and learning, and how they were evaluated differently by districts in these two regions in 2007–08 (Michigan) and 2008–09 (Beijing). We further combine these two independent samples and build two-level Multivariate Hierarchical Linear Models (HMLM) to estimate the extent to which district evaluation features were associated with principal leadership practice. Descriptive results indicated that Beijing principals were more likely to engage in core activities of instructional leadership (such as direct interactions with students about their learning, observing classrooms, and providing feedback to teachers) than their Michigan peers. Moreover, HMLM results suggest that district principal evaluation can serve as a powerful policy instrument to promote instructional leadership and should emphasize principals’ organizational impact on instructional and learning outcomes in determining evaluation purposes, contents, and sources of evidence.

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Notes

  1. The district’s new principal evaluation system was based on its teacher evaluation system, which, in turn, was based on Danielson’s Framework for Teaching (1996); the new system was characterized by clear performance standards (dimensions) and rubrics differentiating performance on the dimensions. Depending on a given principal’s years of experience and prior evaluations, he or she was evaluated with regard to their performance on two or more of the dimensions each year. Under the new evaluation system, most of the data were collected by district administrators through observations and conferences. The district’s old evaluation system, like those in many other districts, consisted of a checklist of personal traits and behaviors, and it did not feature a rubric differentiating levels of performance (Kimball, Milanowski, and McKinney 2007).

  2. Since there was no major educational reform newly introduced between 2008 and 2009 in either Michigan or Beijing, the one-year difference in collecting data will not affect this comparison.

  3. There was no exact term of “Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP)” in Beijing. But Beijing Department of Education had similar practices of monitoring student progress at the school level as AYP in Michigan.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies, Virginia Tech, Room 206 East Eggleston, Blacksburg, VA, 24061, USA

    Min Sun

  2. Department of Teacher Education, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, 48824, USA

    Peter Youngs

  3. College of Education, Renmin University of China, Beijing, China

    Haiyan Yang

  4. Faculty of Education, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China

    Hongqi Chu & Qian Zhao

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  1. Min Sun
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  2. Peter Youngs
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  3. Haiyan Yang
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  4. Hongqi Chu
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  5. Qian Zhao
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Correspondence to Min Sun.

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Sun, M., Youngs, P., Yang, H. et al. Association of District Principal Evaluation with learning-centered leadership practice: Evidence from Michigan and Beijing. Educ Asse Eval Acc 24, 189–213 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11092-012-9145-7

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