Maine news, sports, weather | Kennebec Journal, Augusta, Maine

STATE HOUSE

Principals' group devises its own assessment rules

By Matthew Stone mstone@centralmaine.com
Staff Writer

AUGUSTA -- A four-month-old, 12-member state panel charged with analyzing teacher and principal evaluation systems that incorporate student achievement data will resume its work on Thursday.

As that group gathers in Augusta, another group of Maine educators will mark more than 2 1/2 years hashing out methods for evaluating school principals: Since December 2007, the supervision and evaluation committee of the Maine Principals' Association has taken stock of the evaluation systems in use in school districts throughout Maine.

Before that, the group had done the same for teacher evaluations, said Jane White-Kilcollins, the principal of Hilltop Elementary School in Caribou and the committee's new chairwoman.

The principals on that committee, White-Kilcollins said, found a varied landscape when it came to evaluating Maine administrators.

"Some districts have very structured processes in place for administrator evaluations," she said. "In other districts, it was inconsistent, even within the district."

White-Kilcollins said the evaluation committee has worked using a national set of standards to identify the common traits that effective evaluation systems share.

"We wanted to research what's out there and share this information with the districts throughout the state," she said.

According to the committee, effective systems include clearly defined standards, collaborative goal setting, self-evaluation and reflection, ongoing dialogues with supervisors andformal written evaluations.

The evaluation committee didn't start its work with an explicit goal of figuring out how to use student achievement data as a factor in evaluations, White-Kilcollins said.

"That's something that we will put out there as a possibility of being included in the administrator evaluation," she said. "However, that's more closely related to the teacher evaluation as opposed to the administrator evaluation."

White-Kilcollins says student achievement fits in the "collaborative goal setting" element of an effective evaluation system.

While the principals' evaluation committee did its research, a new president was elected and teacher and principal evaluations that incorporate student academic data became a focal point of that president's education reform agenda.

"It was a positive sign for us because it told us that we were working on a need that others saw as a need as well," White-Kilcollins said. "It's just nice to know that we're all looking to move toward the same thing, working on the same need."

Matthew Stone -- 623-3811, ext. 435

mstone@centralmaine.com