Test Performance Does not an Educational Leader Make!

It's too easy to measure an educational leader’s success by looking myopically at students’ performance on test scores. It seems like policymakers and education laypeople take the easy way out when they look to what they believe is the most concrete measure of student achievement and consider success based on standardized test scores.

I have been struggling to reconcile my core belief that standardized test scores are a poor measure of school and teacher success with the way society looks at me as an educational leader. I work hard to help my teachers, principals, and supervisors support student preparation for standardized tests because I know we will all be judged by assessment results. But why should my success be based mostly on how well my students do on the tests and perceivably how well the teachers have prepared the students for those tests? The PARCC and other standardized assessments are validly one measure of a child's progress, but many distinguished educational scholars rightly make a compelling case for the high value of using multiple measures to judge student progress (read senior research associate in the School of Education at Duquesne University Susan Brookhart's excellent ASCD article about this subject by clicking here).

I want to be measured by other means. Perhaps my ability to address the needs of all learners by creating specialized programs is something people could use to measure me? Maybe my work to communicate with all the stakeholders should be an indication of my success? Shouldn't the myriad ways I engage members of the local community in the decision-making process be considered an example of my ability to lead effectively?

Educational leadership is not a "black and white" enterprise- it is a craft that requires an individual to see the world in myriad "colors" that calls for all kinds of creative solutions to problems and different approaches to relating to people with divergent personalities and attitudes. Leaders should be judged according to their ability to effectively help the community they serve grow socially, emotionally, and academically and not only by their capability to get their students to perform well on tests.