One of the distinctive roles and responsibilities of school principals to be exercised as administrative manager (R. A. No. 9155) is “using data and information from the School Integrated Monitoring and Evaluation System to correct, assist, improve and modify programs.”
In my study, the performance level of school principals in their major functions and responsibilities, head teachers assessed and rated their school principals in fiscally autonomous national high schools in the Schools Division of Nueva Ecija as outstanding with a weighted mean of 4.35. This means that the school principals used data and other information from the result of integrated monitoring and evaluation indicating that they: ensures that multiple sources of data are collected and used to assess student performance such as the quarterly result of test examinations; engages the entire staff in analysing student achievement data; identifies discrepancies between current and desired outcomes; engages staff and other stakeholders in a collaborative process to clarify the problem(s); facilitates the identification of priority needs, based on the data analysis, to address in a school-wide effort; models the use of data to make decisions; regularly asks staff to identify the data they used in making a decision; evaluates the assessment competencies of teachers and supports gaps with staff development; uses a variety of tools including technology to organize and analyse data.
Porter, Goldpring et. Al, (2007) revealed that principals systematically collect and analyse data to make judgments that guide decisions and actions for continuous improvement. “Effective principals try to draw the most from statistics and evidence, having learned to ask useful questions of the information, to display it in ways that tell compelling stories and not to use it to promote collaborative inquiry among others (Portin, Knapp et al., 2009)”. School principals view data as a means not only to pinpoint problems but to understand their nature and causes (Seashore, leitwood et al., 2010).
Indeed, one of the important roles of the principal is that improving the educational program based on data and information and they should provide dynamic leadership that can address and cope for systematic change to pursue ever-higher levels of student achievement as key to a school’s success as what Ojo and Olaniyan (2008) stated, “Principals have to provide leadership and coordination in periodic and continuing evaluations of the effectiveness of the total school program to meet the needs of the students”.
Read: Principals in Reforming and Innovating the School System