Performance Evaluation of Public Secondary School Principals in Kenya : A Review of the Forgotten Imperatives of Quality

In Kenya, it’s almost common sense when one is asked about the best school around. The first thing that strikes in mind is a cursory comparison of school mean scores in the Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) examination which tie neatly with the number of government-sponsored students that join local public universities. The obsession for mean scores have driven some schools to employ some unorthodox ways of ensuring acceptable mean scores like registering academically weak students in other examination centers or forcing them to repeat against the guidelines of the country’s education ministry. These practices are likely to relegate the country’s education system to be largely academic as nurturing of the innovative mind is left to fester to extinction. It is worth noting that realization of the country’s vision 2030 largely revolves around the extent to which the education system embraces innovativeness rather than just producing elitist individuals. Therefore, this paper attempts to provide an empirical framework upon which government agencies and interested stakeholders can use to monitor and evaluate in a holistic sense the progressive attainment of Kenya’s national goals of education and avoid ‘myopism’ of what actually constitutes good performance for a public secondary school principal. The beacons of performance discussed are: Governance; Progressive attainment of education goals and the concept of education quality