What Do Effective District Leaders Do? Strategies for Evaluating District Leadership. Policy Snapshot

In the wake of the Common Core State Standards and teacher evaluation reform, school leaders increasingly look to district leaders for support, coaching, and leadership. District leaders--superintendents, assistant or area superintendents, specialists, principal supervisors, and school business administrators--can hold varying and multiple roles in the district. Reform of district leader evaluations has lagged behind that of teachers and principals, but creating evaluations that accurately reflect district leader responsibilities is of critical importance. Reform of district leader evaluations is an emerging issue, and the research and policy base needed to inform this effort is limited. That said, more organizations, including the National School Boards Association and the American Association of School Administrators, are increasingly investing resources to think more deeply about district evaluation, and new resources and research may be forthcoming. In addition, the strategies used and the lessons learned from states and districts that have already begun this work, as well as teacher and principal evaluation reform, can help inform states and districts that are just beginning to engage in this area of reform.This Policy Snapshot explores district leadership evaluation in the context of state policy and provide information that governors, state legislatures, state boards of education, and state education agencies may wish to consider when designing and implementing evaluation systems for superintendents and other district leaders. This brief is divided into two sections: (1) Defining effective district leadership: What do effective district leaders do?; and (2) Setting evaluation policies for district leaders: What strategies can states use? This brief highlights existing evaluation policies as examples to illustrate the strategies in practice. the authors offer these examples to inform state's policy and legislative deliberation, but they do not endorse any of the programs featured.