New Evaluations For SFPS Workers Proposed
Superintendent says accountability will be greater with plan
At the halfway point of Santa Fe Public Schools’ new superintendent Joel Boyd’s 100-day “Entry and Learning Plan,” he’s introduced a new plan for evaluating school personnel.
At Tuesday night’s school board meeting, Boyd, with the help of Assessment and Accountability Director Lynn Vanderlinden, outlined a “performance compact model” he plans to use for employee evaluations, starting with school principals.
“This is a new approach to shared accountability that will begin to permeate through the entire system,” Boyd said before the meeting. “Anyone who leads a core function will have a performance compact developed.”
Boyd said he expects to have the compact for principals finalized by Oct. 1.
The model was developed through research into what is being done in other states, and the adopted standardized scale used for various metrics was borrowed from the School Dis--
trict of Philadelphia, where Boyd previously worked.
Phase 1 of Boyd’s Entry and Learning Plan is listening, and from what he’s heard so far, there is a need to bring accountability into the equation used for performance evaluations.
“There was no clear system of performance management in Santa Fe Public Schools,” said Boyd, who began his new job Aug. 1. “There was a perception here that people were evaluated based on personality and not performance.”
Boyd also said there was no clear system for goal setting and improvement. Those are addressed at the beginning of the process when expectations are defined at the beginning of the school year.
Boyd said expectations could be defined differently for different staff members. For example, expectations for a first-year principal would likely be different than those of a returning principal. In addition, each school is unique, so expectations at one school could be quite distinct from another, he said.
Once expectations are set, it would be up to the central office to provide the required support. Only then can school personnel be held accountable, Boyd said.
“This is about performance management; accountability is just one aspect,” he said. “If you don’t have the first two, it’s unfair to apply the third.”
Principals first
Boyd said having a strong principal is critical to a school’s success. He identifies four components — student achievement, school operations, community satisfaction and instructional leadership — as indicators of a high-quality school, and all are integrated into the performance compact used to evaluate principals.
Hard data would be used for the student achievement and school operations components. Standards-Based Assessment (SBA) scores and the A-F school accountability grades would be used to measure student achievement. Teacher and student attendance, Special Education and English Language Learners compliance and a safety audit are some of the proposed indicators used for school operations.
Community satisfaction and instructional leadership would be measured by use of survey data from parents, students and staff.
Boyd, who has the authority to hire and fire principals, said this method is more comprehensive and less subjective than if the critique was just left up to him.
“This represent s a 360-degree review,” he said. “The community and teachers get a chance to weigh in on this through survey data, so it’s not the superintendent making decisions in isolation.”
Boyd said the plan is subject to Public Education Department approval, but he didn’t anticipate that to be a problem.