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. In spite of its growing popularity, principal evaluation often receives short shrift, due, in part, to confusion and misperception about the purpose of evaluation and the formation and application of evaluation criteria. Yet the same survey showed that superintendents often perceive the evaluations as being more thorough than the principals do, and that only a handful of districts have clearly defined performance levels. In addition, confusion over evaluation criteria vitiates many evaluation projects.