With the need to meet a set of higher accountability standards such as Interstate School Leaders Licensure Consortium (ISLLC) Standards and the AYP benchmarks of the NCLB Act, for example, school principals are faced with the knowledge that they play a vital role in school effectiveness as well as teacher retention, parent participation, and student behavior. As a result, it is important for principals to find ways to continually stay abreast of the best strategies for tackling day-to-day and long-term school issues such as acquiring and allocating resources, maintaining a clearly articulated vision that is focused on student learning, establishing trust and open lines of communication among faculty and staff, and, perhaps most importantly, providing instructional leadership. Two valuable strategies that can be used to identify areas of improvement for individual administrators are through the use of formative and summative assessments. Formative and summative assessments for administrators serve a multitude of purposes. These assessments should be used by school districts to evaluate and assess potential areas for improvement for individual school principals in order to target professional developmental needs, and they should be adaptable enough to take into account a principal's workplace contexts (e.g., urbanicity or poverty level). This paper presents a list of important points that both the district and the building-level principals should remember before embarking on the use of formative and summative assessment to improve leadership practices.