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1998 BYU Educ. & L.J. 19 (1998)
Creating Legally Valid School Administrator Evaluation Policy in Utah

handle is hein.journals/byuelj1998 and id is 23 raw text is: CREATING LEGALLY VALID SCHOOL ADMINISTRATOR EVALUATION POLICY IN UTAH By Steve Baldridge* I. INTRODUCTION The use of personnel evaluations as a tool to spur improved perfor- mance has been a common element of public school reform efforts. Teacher evaluations were the first form of personnel evaluations to become widely used in education. In the last decade, however, teacher evaluation policies across the country were revised because of concerns about their validity. In conjunction with their efforts to improve the quality of teacher evaluations, many states and districts began to require administrator evalu- ations as well. Today, public school administrator evaluation is required by law in forty-seven states. The 1990 amendments to the Utah Educator Evaluation Act require valid and reliable evaluations of all certificated school em- ployees-including school administrators.' To this author's knowledge, Jordan School District remains the only district in Utah to have taken steps necessary to comply with the statutory standards of validity. An adverse decision in a 1991 administrative hearing motivated the district to create new teacher and administrator evaluation policies.3 The hearing examiner found that an educator could not be denied merit pay because of sub-stan- dard evaluations under an evaluation policy for which the district could not produce legally adequate validation evidence.4 Many other districts would likely fare no better. * Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership, Barry University. B.A., 1989, Washington & Lee University; J.D., 1992, Brigham Young University; Ph.D. in Educational Leadership, 1996, Brigham Young University. The author appreciates suggestions from Drs. Steven J. Iite, E. Vance Randall, Cindy Skaruppa and Kevin Worthen on previous drafts of this article. 1. See C. Furtwengler, State Requirements for the Evaluation of School Administrators, Paper presented at the American Educational Research Association annual meeting, New Orleans, LA, 1994. 2. See generally UTAH CODE ANN. § 53A-10-101 et seq. (1990). 3. Dr. David Sperry, Report of the Hearing Examiner (January 14, 1991) (on file with Pat Thompson at the Jordan School District Office of Program Services and Evaluation). 4. Id. at 18.