Cover Up This Face? The Principal Takes a Stand

This case was written for graduate students, specifically for individuals seeking school principal licensure. The COVID-19 pandemic has forced school organizations, particularly building and district leaders, to modify and alter the traditional educational model. School district leaders hosted virtual town hall meetings to receive community input to determine the safest option to deliver instruction to students. Educational leaders have endured challenges from stakeholder groups that pertain to students returning to campus amid a pandemic. Future school leaders can use this case to examine their knowledge of case law, student discipline, and navigating a complex scenario due to COVID-19.

The Performance Assessment for Leaders: Construct Validity and Reliability Evidence

The Performance Assessment for Leaders (PAL) was developed by a team of nationally recognized experts in response to a Massachusetts requirement to determine and evaluate the leadership abilities of candidates seeking initial school principal licensure. This article describes and evaluates research conducted on all aspects of a 2014-2015 statewide field trial of PAL. Findings suggest that this assessment is a valid and reliable measure of individual candidate competence for granting initial school leader licensure, and is a positive, educative experience for candidates. It concludes with implications for use elsewhere.

Performance Assessment for Principal Licensure: Evidence From Content and Face Validation and Bias Review

This article presents the validity bias review feedback and outcomes of new performance-based assessments to evaluate candidates seeking principal licensure. Until now, there has been little empirical work on performance assessment for principal licensure. One state recently developed a multi-task performance assessment for leaders and has implemented it for statewide use in initial principal licensure decisions; this development process is described here, focusing on content validity and bias review, and incorporates candidate and program faculty validiation as well. The results demonstrate the content validity, relevance, and feasibility of this new performance assessment for leaders, and yield implications for leader assessment generally.

Principal Licensure Exams and Future Job Performance: Evidence From the School Leaders Licensure Assessment

Many states require prospective principals to pass a licensure exam to obtain an administrative license, but we know little about the potential effects of principal licensure exams on the pool of available principals or whether scores predict later job performance. We investigate the most commonly used exam, the School Leaders Licensure Assessment (SLLA), using 10 years of data on Tennessee test takers. We uncover substantial differences in passage rates by test-taker characteristics. In particular, non-Whites are 12 percentage points less likely than otherwise similar White test takers to attain the required licensure score. Although candidates with higher scores are more likely to be hired as principals, we find little evidence that SLLA scores predict measures of principal job performance, including supervisors’ evaluation ratings or teachers’ assessments of school leadership from a statewide survey. Our results raise questions about whether conditioning administrative licensure on SLLA passage is consistent with principal workforce diversity goals.