The Tenuous Nature of Superintendent Evaluation

School Administrator, Feb, 2001 by Jay Mathews

Reluctant to use student outcomes, boards try more detailed assessments of system leaders' performance

The first time Pat Ruane was evaluated as a school superintendent it did not come out quite the way she and her school committee had hoped.

At the time, Ruane was running the Needham, Mass., school district. Members of the school committee (what Massachusetts calls school boards) marked her on a scale of 1 to 5 on an assortment of measures.

This is the way many school boards evaluate superintendents, according to recent surveys and interviews with administrators across the country. The process is often very simple. Forms are filled out by each school board member and sometimes summarized by the board chair. The board then discusses the results with the superintendent once a year during an executive session. Goals for the new year are agreed upon, and everybody goes home.

In Needham, Ruane had worked hard and made progress. The school committee gave her high marks. Its members conscientiously tried to reflect their opinions and those of the community, but the evaluation process was not something with which they had much experience or training, particularly in the way it would be perceived by the public.

Some members, wedded to a grading philosophy that schoolchildren know too well, did not want to mark Ruane so high that she did not have room to show improvement. So there were many 4's that might otherwise have been 5's. A local newspaper decided to run a story saying the district had, at best, a B-plus superintendent.

When they saw the story, Ruane says, the board members "really felt terrible. It was not their intent to give me a B."

Four years later, Ruane is midway through the second year of her new job as superintendent of the Lexington, Mass., schools. This time her board evaluation has been a very different process, a sign that changes are coming to this very old and often shortchanged part of school board routine.

The marks Ruane received in Lexington were also very high, but they came not in quick marks of 4s or 5s, but in a seven-page report that summarized an exhaustive review. The school committee members asked questions not only of themselves, but many other people involved in the community's schools.

"The school committee interviewed 23 people with whom the superintendent had direct contact," says Susan Elberger, whose term on the committee expired after the Ruane evaluation was done. "These included all her direct reports (principals, central-office administrators and others), presidents of all five unions in the school system, the town manager and a member of our board of selectmen, In addition, each of the five school committee members wrote an evaluation, as did the superintendent."

Critiques in Detail

Not many school boards are willing or able to put such effort into grading their superintendents. What the Lexington school committee did is often called a 360-degree evaluation, one that looks at the person being assessed from every possible angle. (A complete 360-degree assessment would have queried parents and students, which Lexington did not do.)

Many superintendents and personnel experts say school boards are taking the process more seriously than they have in the past and are moving toward longer and more detailed reports.

"Evaluations have more hard data, are less subjective and more objective, and the indices that the school boards are looking for are those measures that really make a difference and are clearly designed to do more for children," says Jim Warren, a superintendent for 16 years in two Illinois districts and now a partner in the Bickert Group, an executive search firm.

Edward Costa, superintendent in East Longmeadow, Mass., says one part of his evaluation assesses how he has done in reaching 47 objectives; another part measures his progress in meeting long-term strategic goals. "When used together they have proven very successful," he says.

But despite this trend, experts say, the majority of superintendents still find the evaluation process not much more detailed, time-consuming or helpful than a credit check at Sears. Nor do evaluations yet draw much notice outside the boardroom.

"Most board evaluation is done in executive sessions [closed to the public and the press], and in most states is mandated by statute," according to AASA's 2000 Study of the American School Superintendency. "Often the evaluation is given at the same meeting that the superintendent's contract is rolled forward or a new contract is offered. Seldom are the results of the evaluation made public except in a general manner.

"What I hear most of the time from superintendents is that their board spends all of five to 10 minutes per year on the evaluation," says Joe Rudnicki, superintendent in Sunnyvale, Calif. "I believe this is very dangerous and that leads to serious trouble. How can a board believe in a process that has been so cursory for so long?"

Test Connections

New surveys of superintendents show substantial use of evaluations, with a growing interest in tying the assessment to state learning goals. But there are also some surprisingly negative feelings on the part of many superintendents toward the process. Many believe their evaluations often fail to measure some matters, such as conflicting philosophies, that can do serious harm to relations between superintendents and their boards.