Defining principal effectiveness: Measuring the value of effective principals using the principal effectiveness evaluation rubric

The evaluation of a campus principal can be a challenging process due largely to the complicated factors that exist to capture an accurate assessment of a principal’s leadership effectiveness. Generally, principal evaluations are conducted by districtlevel officials who often do not have the time or the resources to observe campus principals on a regular basis. Further, principal evaluation systems (PES) are designed to improve the practice of principals (Clifford & Ross, 2012; Davis, Kearney, Sanders, Thomas, & Leon, 2011; Fuller & Hollinsworth, 2014a; Fuller, et al., 2015), and there has historically been an acknowledgement that these evaluations do not always achieve this purpose. Therefore, the overarching purpose of an evaluation is to use defensible criteria to judge the worth or merit of a principal. Critical to this definition is “defensible criteria” as the Joint Committee on Standards for Educational Evaluation (Gullickson & Howard, 2009) recommends that personnel evaluations should rely on defensible criteria to ensure such evaluations are “ethical, fair, useful, feasible, and accurate”. The Principal Effectiveness Evaluation Rubric is designed to evaluate the various themes found in the literature to help determine set criteria that is most used to measure principal effectiveness.