Just this month, the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) wing of the U.S. Department of Education released a report about using value-added models (VAMs) for measuring school principals’ performance. The article conducted by researchers at Mathematica Policy Research and titled “Can Student Test Scores Provide Useful Measures of School Principals’ Performance?” can be found online here, with my summary of the study findings highlighted next and herein.

Before the passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), 40 states had written into their state statutes, as incentivized by the federal government, to use growth in student achievement growth for annual principal evaluation purposes. More states had written growth/value-added models (VAMs) for teacher evaluation purposes, which we have covered extensively via this blog, but this pertains only to school and/or principal evaluation purposes. Now since the passage of ESSA, and the reduction in the federal government’s control over state-level policies, states now have much more liberty to more freely decide whether to continue using student achievement growth for either purposes. This paper is positioned within this reasoning, and more specifically to help states decide whether or to what extent they might (or might not) continue to move forward with using growth/VAMs for school and principal evaluation purposes.

Researchers, more specifically, assessed (1) reliability – or the consistency or stability of these ratings over time, which is important “because only stable parts of a rating have the potential to contain information about principals’ future performance; unstable parts reflect only transient aspects of their performance;” and (2) one form of multiple evidences of validity – the predictive validity of these principal-level measures, with predictive validity defined as “the extent to which ratings from these measures accurately reflect principals’ contributions to student achievement in future years.” In short, “A measure could have high predictive validity only if [emphasis added] it was highly stable between consecutive years [i.e., reliability]…and its stable part was strongly related to principals’ contributions to student achievement” over time (i.e., predictive validity).

Researchers used principal-level value-added (unadjusted and adjusted for prior achievement and other potentially biasing demographic variables) to more directly examine “the extent to which student achievement growth at a school differed from average growth statewide for students with similar prior achievement and background characteristics.” Also important to note is that the data they used to examine school-level value-added came from Pennsylvania, which is one of a handful of states that uses the popular and proprietary (and controversial) Education Value-Added Assessment System (EVAAS) statewide.

Here are the researchers’ key findings, taken directly from the study’s summary (again, for more information see the full manuscript here).

• The two performance measures in this study that did not account for students’ past achievement—average achievement and adjusted average achievement—provided no information for predicting principals’ contributions to student achievement in the following year.
• The two performance measures in this study that accounted for students’ past achievement—school value-added and adjusted school value-added—provided, at most, a small amount of information for predicting principals’ contributions to student achievement in the following year. This was due to instability and inaccuracy in the stable parts.
• Averaging performance measures across multiple recent years did not improve their accuracy for predicting principals’ contributions to student achievement in the following year. In simpler terms, a principal’s average rating over three years did not predict his or her future contributions more accurately than did a rating from the most recent year only. This is more of a statistical finding than one that has direct implications for policy and practice (except for silly states who might, despite findings like those presented in this study, decide that they can use one year to do this not at all well instead of three years to do this not at all well).

Their bottom line? “…no available measures of principal [/school] performance have yet been shown to accurately identify principals [/schools] who will contribute successfully to student outcomes in future years,” especially if based on students’ test scores, although the researchers also assert that “no research has ever determined whether non-test measures, such as measures of principals’ leadership practices, [have successfully or accurately] predict[ed] their future contributions” either.

The researchers follow-up with a highly cautionary note: “the value-added measures will make plenty of mistakes when trying to identify principals [/schools] who will contribute effectively or ineffectively to student achievement in future years. Therefore, states and districts should exercise caution when using these measures to make major decisions about principals. Given the inaccuracy of the test-based measures, state and district leaders and researchers should also make every effort to identify nontest measures that can predict principals’ future contributions to student outcomes [instead].”

Citation: Chiang, H., McCullough, M., Lipscomb, S., & Gill, B. (2016). Can student test scores provide useful measures of school principals’ performance? Washington DC: U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences. Retrieved from http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/pubs/2016002/pdf/2016002.pdf