ERIC Digest Series Number 60. They work in schools, but they are not teachers. They are educational managers, but they often have little contact with other managers. Given principals' ambiguous status, it is not surprising that they often receive only perfunctory evaluations. Yet effective principals are essential to effective schools.
Principal evaluation brings many benefits.
Some 97 percent of the administrators in her study agreed that the process of evaluation had encouraged communication between principals and superintendents, and 88 percent agreed that the principals had improved as a result. Formative evaluation is relatively informal and is geared toward helping principals improve. Summative evaluation is more structured. Its goal is to precisely evaluate performance, and it is often used to facilitate decisions over compensation or tenure. Fifteen years earlier, only a few states required a principal evaluation program.