Leadership Assessment and Evaluation

Independent schools – charter and private – and educational non-profits have boards. This is both a blessing and a challenge. Board members may or may not have served on a board, experienced a functional board, or have a deep understanding of what boards are supposed to do. Executive directors and heads of school may be similar in their governance experience, or lack thereof. 

Most evaluation protocols for school leaders require you to be good at 87,000 different things and focus on leadership characteristics. They tend towards the subjective and are cluncky in implementation. Survey-based protocols rely on staff and board member's opinions about how the school leader is doing, though none of these prople understand the scope of the role. At best they are a rubber stamp for the school leader. At worst they are inaccurate and allow opinion to override achievements.

Most evaluation systems for boards focus on the operational elements - committees, meetings,  bylaws, policies, etc. They tend to not help the board identify what they need to do to ensure that the students are thriving, arguably the most important objective of a school. They do not take into account the relationship each board member has to the board as a whole, the organization, or each other. They do not include the school leader as a full board member or examine the quality of the relationship with the leader.

Our approach is to look at two key areas: the elements of the the school that indicate that leadership is doing a good job and the relationships between the board members and school leader. We recommend that assessments, evaluations, and subsequent goal-setting for both the board and leader are done as parts of the same process.