The Mantle of Agency: Principals’ Use of Teacher Evaluation Policy

ABSTRACT

Understanding Consequential Assessment Systems for Teachers (UCAST) studied a large urban school district in the United States as it adopted a new teacher evaluation system. This project studied 1,000 principals as they were trained to use this new system, and followed them into their first three years of implementation. This article features a multiple-case case study of three of these school principals. Findings indicate principals exercise professional judgment by donning evaluation policy as a “mantle of agency” for working toward a host of aims sometimes aligned with and sometimes antithetical to stated policy. Implications for policy and practice are discussed.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the W.T.Grant Foundation for its generous support of this work. We are also deeply grateful to the administrators in Los Angeles who graciously allowed us to learn from them. Finally, we thank the anonymous reviewers whose guidance and suggestions have improved the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. There were 23 administrators that participated in both years one and two.

2. All names are pseudonyms.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the William T Grant Foundation [181068].