A word about superintendent evaluation

To the extent that we have a superintendent evaluation season in Massachusetts, it is superintendent evaluation season in Massachusetts¹, and so a few words on it, with a note or two for my fellow Worcester residents, as our school committee has to turn in their individual evaluations to Mayor Petty by the end of this week; those then are put together into a single composite evaluation.

All licensed educators in Massachusetts are evaluated according to a state-mandated system. Superintendents becoming part of that state-mandated system was among the changes that came in as part of the 2010 Act Relative to the Achievement Gap. To say that this was a revolutionary change for school committees would be an understatement²; it's also worth noting that school committees are the only group in Massachusetts that evaluates according to the educator rubric who do not do so as full-time educators. You can find a document describing how superintendent evaluation is done here. 

It's crucial to understand that the evaluation does not stand, and is not done, in isolation. When superintendents do their self-evaluation--Worcester, we saw this from Dr. Monárrez at the last Worcester School Committee meeting--they aren't evaluating themselves on things they came up with on their own, or what has occurred to them as important. The goals on which they are evaluated are set by the school committee³ at the beginning of the evaluation cycle; for Dr. Monárrez, that was last summer. They then are reporting out on how they're doing on those goals (ideally; this did happen in Worcester!) ongoingly over the course of the year. Reports of the superintendent--and again, in Worcester, this happened at every meeting this year--are reporting on progress towards those goals.

Superintendents are required to have goals in three areas: district goal, student goal, professional practice goal.

For Dr. Monárrez for this year, those goals have been: 

1. By June 30, 2024, ensure a district-wide system for recruitment, hiring, and retention of a talented, culturally and linguistically competent workforce through a culture of belonging and authentic engagement as measured by a 10% narrowing of the gap between overall student and staff demographics. (District goal)
   
   
2. By June 30, 2024, strengthen maintenance protocols and implement school safety recommendations to guarantee the continual modernization of all WPS facilities, cultivating an environment that is both secure and supportive of learning by building capacity and valuing knowledge as measured by 100% completion of highest priority, emergency projects identified through safety audit. (District goal)
   
   
3. By June 30, 2024, collaboratively lead school teams in identifying and using multiple sources of evidence to assess, respond, and improve outcomes in all schools with an intentional focus on historically underserved youth through building capacity and valuing knowledge, authentic engagement and a sense of belonging as measured by: • Increase grade 3 reading performance demonstrated by the STAR assessment by from the end of the school year 2022-23 to the end of the school year 2023-24 • Increase the percentage of students in grades 7-12 who self-report that they are engaged in school as measured by the WPS Culture and Climate Survey (Panorama) • Increase the number of Formerly Limited English Proficient Students (F-LEP) (Student goal)
   
   
4. By June 30, 2024 participation in New Superintendent Induction Program (NSIP) year 2 will have been completed with all required projects submitted. (Professional practice goal)
   

For each goal, the superintendent either exceeded the goal; met the goal; made significant progress toward the goal; made some progress towards the goal; or did not meet the goal. 

Note that if the goal is well written, this should be a pretty straightforward evaluation; met/exceeded is what it is, and the only call is if partial progress is "some" or "significant."

At the same time, superintendents, like all educators, are evaluated by their standards of professional practice, which fall into four realms: 

1. Instructional Leadership
2. Management and Operations
3. Family and Community Engagement
4. Professional Culture

All four standards have multiple indicators describing what achieving that standards looks like, done well. To give you an example, the indicators under instructional leadership are:

• I-A. Curriculum: Ensures that all instructional staff design effective and rigorous standards-based units of instruction consisting of well-structured lessons with measureable outcomes.
• I-B. Instruction: Ensures that practices in all settings reflect high expectations regarding content and quality of effort and work, engage all students, and are personalized to accommodate diverse learning styles, needs, interests, and levels of readiness.
• I-C. Assessment: Ensures that all principals and administrators facilitate practices that propel personnel to use a variety of formal and informal methods and assessments to measure student learning, growth, and understanding and make necessary adjustments to their practice when students are not learning.
• I-D. Evaluation: Ensures effective and timely supervision and evaluation of all staff in alignment with state regulations and contract provisions.
• I-E. Data-Informed Decision Making: Uses multiple sources of evidence related to student learning—including state, district, and school assessment results and growth data—to inform school and district goals and improve organizational performance, educator effectiveness, and student learning.
• I-F. Student Learning: Demonstrates expected impact on student learning based on multiple measures of student learning, growth, and achievement, including student progress on common assessments and statewide student growth measures where available

For every indicator, the educator is either proficient (which is the standard); exemplary (literally is an example of this indicator); needs improvement (or, for a new educator "developing"); or unsatisfactory. The Department has a very well-fleshed out rubric of what each indicator at each level actually looks like here. Thus for the first one above, Instructional Leadership: Curriculum, the rubric describes: 

Notice again how the evaluator doesn't get to just make things up on this; you're in one of these squares.

Several years ago, due to coordinated work among MASS, MASC, and DESE, an update to the best practice in superintendent evaluation established that superintendents and school committees were advised to at the time of goal setting select only a few indicators, covering all four standards, that aligned with the goals, and set those as the focus indicators, thus not evaluating the superintendent on all indicators.
This does not mean the superintendent doesn't have to do the rest of these; it means that everyone has agreed on what the aspects that are most crucial for the school committee to focus on in their evaluation. 

This was done in Worcester last year, and you saw this Dr. Monárrez's self-evaluation before the School Committee: 

• For the first goal, indicator IIB on Human Resources Management and Development is the focus indicator.
• For the second goal, indicator IIA on Environment is the focus indicator.
• For the third goal, indicators 1A Curriculum, IC Assessment, 1E Data-Informed Decision Making, and IIIB Sharing Responsibility are the focus indicators
• For the fourth goal, indicators are IV-A Commitment to High Standards and IV-E Shared Vision

It's important to understand that those are the indicators on which Dr. Monárrez is being evaluated. The evaluation cannot, by design--and by state design--be all over the place. 
This isn't a riff on if you like the superintendent or not, in other words; this is very directly "did these things happen and are these professional practices being done?"

That's it. 

Now, I offer this today not actually to offer commentary on what the school committee, in Worcester or anywhere, is doing. I share this because we very often hear "get in touch with the school committee about the evaluation," and indeed, we have seen people doing exactly that.

I am never going to tell you to not contact your elected officials. 

What I am going to offer here, though, is this: if you want to offer thoughts to the school committee on the superintendent's evaluation, share your reflections and insight on the above. Your liking, not liking, feeling a particular way, or what have you is what it is, but it is not what the superintendent is evaluated on. 

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¹The only actual requirement is that superintendents be evaluated annually, save in the case of a long-serving superintendent, who may, on mutual agreement with the school committee, be evaluated every other year.
²While Worcester takes the cake for the utter randomness of their city manager evaluations in the past--if the words "cocktail napkin" don't ring a bell, you missed a particularly outstanding example!--school committees were very much all over the place prior to this system going into place.
³In the state educator evaluation system, goals, though often proposed by the educator, are set by the evaluator. In the case of superintendents, that means by vote of the School Committee.