Adding teachers’ and students’ perspectives to classic principal-evaluation tools like supervisor observations can give a significantly more accurate picture of a school leader’s effectiveness, found a new study by the Regional Educational Laboratory Midwest.
Researchers at the lab, house—one on instructional leadership and another on cultural press for excellence—as well as a student-survey measure of the instructional environment in classrooms, together explained a significant portion of the differences among schools’ gains on value-added measures: 28 percentage points in math and 26 percentage points on a composite of math and reading scores.
