Riding the wave of administrator accountability: a portfolio approach

Purpose – This paper aims to describe a qualitative study of a four‐year, state‐wide portfolio evaluation system for new principals. The State of Ohio (USA) was one of five states that participated in a field test of the Portfolio Assessment for School Leaders designed by the Interstate School Leaders Licensure Consortium (ISLLC) and the Educational Testing Service (ETS).Design/methodology/approach – The central research question was: Does the Portfolio Assessment for School Leaders process benefit or burden the practice of school leaders? The participants were a subset of the 70 principals who completed the portfolio in Ohio between September 1999 and January 2002. The data included focus group interviews, phone interviews, surveys, and the principals' completed portfolios.Findings – From analysis of the data three levels of benefits from level 1 are desribed, where the portfolio was seen primarily as extra work and had little benefit for the leadership in the principals' schools, to level 3, where there...

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