Title: Exploring accountability through performance evaluation
Description: According to the U.S. Secretary of Education, American public school educators now practice their profession in an "age of accountability" (Duncan, 2011). New forms of educational accountability increasingly focus on individual educators' performance evaluations, which now often include the educator's contribution to student achievement results and other outcomes (Fullan, 2007; Jacques, Clifford, & Hornung, 2012; Schachter, 2010). The purpose of this study was to explore how three U.S. school districts' superintendents, central office leaders, and principals perceived and experienced a results-based evaluation of their own performance and to compare these experiences with a conceptual framework derived from current literature on educational accountability through performance evaluation. The conceptual framework is composed of educational theorists' recommendations for results-based evaluations that they argue will yield improved performance. These include specific purposes for evaluation, motivational theories that should connect evaluations to improved performance, and three expected drivers of changed behavior in those who are evaluated: specific outcome goals, formative and summative feedback, and reciprocal support. These school and district leaders confirmed the conceptual framework's proposed role for specific outcome goals but experienced greater complexity than is represented in the current educational literature around their evaluations' purposes, how the evaluation may or may not motivate them, and the extent to which they receive feedback as part of their performance evaluation. Few leaders in this study reported experiences of reciprocal support, defined as support provided to increase one's capacity in exchange for an evaluation's demand to increase performance (Elmore, 2002).

I found that each district's specific evaluation tool and the districts' individual context and culture likely influenced these leaders' experiences of their results-based evaluation. These findings of greater complexity in results-based evaluations for educational leaders and of the influence of tools, culture, and context offer timely new information about educational accountability through performance evaluation that can inform future research, professional practice, and policy design.
Subjects: Educational accountability, Educational leadership, Evaluation, School management and organization
Places: United States