The Catholic elementary school principal works at the pleasure of the school’s governing agent. The governing bodies may be a local pastor/pastors, a board of directors, or a sponsoring religious community. Each year, the principal is evaluated to determine continuation or dismissal. Evaluation instruments that contain standards make the task more efficient. The National Standards and Benchmarks of Excellent Catholic Schools was introduced in 2009. Although it is a wide-reaching resource to help guide Catholic education, it offers some guidance on the evaluation process. The NSBECS authors sent a survey to all (Arch)Dioceses in the United States to discover usage of the guide. They found that 80% of the systems know of and use the Standards. Standard 6 of the NSBECS offers rubrics on judging leadership in the school. Is this resource used in principal evaluations? This dissertation asks: what are the instruments used in principal evaluation, and is the 2009 NSBECS Standard 6 explicitly referenced in the instruments?

A population of 50 East Coast (Arch)Dioceses was contacted to request evaluation instruments. Of that population, 39 provided documents, eight systems could not participate since their protocol involved an unscripted and unstandardized conversation between the pastor and principal, and three systems did not respond to participation requests. The results show that although 97% of the instruments refer to at least one maxim of Standard 6, use of maxims in Standard 6 varies from 0% to 92% with a mean usage of 59%. Also noteworthy was that 90% of the systems did not explicitly cite the requirement for state or religious leader certification. Evaluation instruments reflective of guidance from resources such as the NSBECS can make the process more efficient.