Start With the Data — How the Q3 Data Review Feeds Your Superintendent Evaluation
May 10, 2027
The June superintendent evaluation is five weeks away. Your board has likely been thinking about it in the abstract — the evaluation instrument, the scoring rubric, the timeline, the board member who will draft the narrative.
Let me reframe the conversation. The superintendent evaluation is not a separate event from the Q3 data review. The Q3 data review is the evidence base for the evaluation. If your board runs the Q3 review the way last week’s post described — with the year-to-date trend analysis, the resource-to-outcome reconciliation, and the pattern-based outcome registration — the evaluation writes itself.
If your board runs the Q3 review as a procedural update and then starts the evaluation from scratch in June, the evaluation will be driven by impressions rather than evidence.
The most common evaluation error
The most common error boards make in superintendent evaluations is starting with the judgment and working backward to find data that supports it. Board members form impressions across the year — the superintendent’s presence at community events, responsiveness to board member phone calls, visibility in the schools. Those impressions are real, but they are not a defensible evaluation base.
A board member who has a positive impression of the superintendent will find data that supports a favorable evaluation. A board member who has a negative impression will find data that supports an unfavorable evaluation. The same superintendent, evaluated by the same board, can receive dramatically different scores depending on which board member’s impression drives the assessment.
The evaluation designed around the superintendent’s personal relationship with each board member is not an evaluation. It’s a popularity contest with a score sheet.
The evaluation designed around student outcome data, goal progress, and the superintendent’s documented leadership on the goals the board adopted is an evaluation.
What the Q3 review produces for the evaluation
The Q3 data review produces four deliverables that map directly onto the superintendent evaluation.
Deliverable one: the goal-by-goal outcome record. Every adopted goal has three data points, a year-to-date trend assessment, and a board-registered outcome. The evaluation’s first question about student progress is answered before the evaluation starts. The superintendent’s effectiveness at leading progress toward each goal is measured by the trend line, not by the board’s collective impression of the superintendent’s effort.
Deliverable two: the resource-to-outcome reconciliation. The board has a documented assessment of whether the investment-to-outcome ratio is improving, stable, or declining for each goal. The evaluation should ask: did the superintendent allocate resources effectively? The reconciliation provides the answer.
Deliverable three: the year-to-date trend analysis. Three data points per goal, visible on a single visual. The trend analysis tells the board whether the direction of change is consistent or inconsistent across goals. The evaluation should ask: is the overall direction of goal progress improving across the district? The trend analysis provides the answer.
Deliverable four: the board’s governance health assessment. The Focused Monitoring Cycle includes an assessment of the board-superintendent partnership. The evaluation should ask two questions: how well did the superintendent lead within the governance structure the board established, and how well did the board maintain its part of the partnership? The governance health assessment provides the answer to the first question. The board’s honesty about its own performance provides the answer to the second.
The evaluation structure that data produces
A data-driven superintendent evaluation follows a different structure than the traditional evaluation. The traditional evaluation starts with the superintendent’s strengths and areas for improvement, supported by anecdotes. The data-driven evaluation starts with the goal-by-goal outcome record and asks one question per goal: what did the superintendent’s leadership produce?
The answer is not “strong” or “needs improvement” in the abstract. The answer is the year-to-date trend analysis, the resource-to-outcome reconciliation, and the board’s assessment of whether the superintendent’s actions — staffing decisions, program investments, data systems, instructional leadership — produced the direction of change the board expected.
For a goal showing consistent improvement, the evaluation question is: what specific leadership actions sustained the improvement, and what does the board want the superintendent to continue? For a goal showing consistent decline, the evaluation question is: what changed, what didn’t change, and what does the board expect the superintendent to do differently? For a goal showing plateau after initial improvement, the evaluation question is: what ceiling did the strategy hit, and what does the board expect the superintendent to adjust?
The evaluation does not score the superintendent on a five-point scale for each goal. The evaluation records the evidence and lets the evidence — the year-to-date trend across three data points — speak for itself.
The board’s role in the evaluation
The superintendent evaluation evaluates the superintendent. But the board should also evaluate its own contribution to the year’s outcomes. The board that asks “how well did you lead against our goals” without asking “how well did we govern in support of those goals” produces an incomplete evaluation.
The board’s governance health assessment — the five indicators from the Focused Monitoring Cycle — provides the self-assessment the board needs to pair with the superintendent evaluation. The board that completes both assessments — one for the superintendent, one for itself — has a complete picture of the governance year. The board that evaluates only the superintendent has a partial picture and a one-sided accountability conversation.
The timeline
The May 3 post described what the board needs from the superintendent for the Q3 review. This post describes what the board needs from itself for the evaluation.
Between now and the evaluation: confirm the evaluation instrument, determine how the Q3 data review outputs will map onto the evaluation domains, and assign a board member to draft the evidence-based narrative — not the score sheet, but the narrative that names the goal-by-goal outcomes and uses them to assess superintendent leadership.
The evaluation should not be a surprise. The superintendent has seen all three data points. The superintendent has read the board’s three outcome registrations. The superintendent knows which goals show improvement, which show decline, and which are stalled. The evaluation is not a reveal. It is a documented conversation that the Q3 data review made possible.
Start with the data. The narrative follows.
Your free CTA: Reply to this email with the keyword EvalData and I’ll send you the Superintendent Evaluation Evidence Template — a one-page framework that maps the Q3 data review deliverables (goal-by-goal outcomes, resource-to-outcome reconciliation, year-to-date trend analysis, governance health assessment) onto the evaluation domains in a format your board can use to draft the evidence section before June.
Your paid CTA: I offer a Spring Governance Cycle Coaching Package — three sessions covering the budget adoption preparation, the public hearing execution, and the mid-year check-in facilitation. I also offer a Superintendent Evaluation Preparation session for boards that want structured support building a data-driven evaluation from the Q3 review outputs. Reply to this email for pricing and availability.
This continues the May arc: Q3 data review (May 3), superintendent evaluation evidence base (May 10), year-end governance report (May 17), and the spring governance closeout (May 26). The evaluation framework extends the Focused Monitoring Cycle and the three-outcome decision framework into the superintendent performance assessment. Subscribe at effectiveschoolboards.com to continue the series.
Backlinks: The Q3 data review (May 3) produced the trend analysis, outcome record, resource-to-outcome reconciliation, and governance health assessment that this post maps onto the evaluation domains. The April arc capstone (Apr 28) and the budget alignment review (Mar 1) provided the budget monitoring framework that connects spending to outcomes in the evaluation. The January governance roadmap (Jan 27) established the evaluation timeline that the board is now executing.