2: Politics and Research: Evaluation of Social Action Programs In Education

Abstract

Although program evaluation is no novelty in education, its objects have changed radically. The national thrust against poverty and discrimination introduced a new phenomenon with which evaluators must deal: large-scale programs of social action in education. In addition to generating much activity in city schools, these programs produced considerable confusion whenever efforts were made to find out whether they were working. The sources of the confusion are not hard to identify. Prior to 1964, the objects of evaluation in education consisted almost exclusively of small programs concerned with such things as curriculum development or teacher training: they generally occurred in a single school or school district, they sought to produce educational change on a limited scale, and they typically involved modest budgets and small research staffs. This all began to change in the mid-1960's, when the federal government and some states established broad educational improvement programs. The programs-such as Project Headstart, Title I of the 1965 ESEA, and Project Follow-Through-differ from the traditional objects of educational evaluation in several important respects: (I) they are social action programs, and as such are not focused narrowly on teachers' in-service training or on a science curriculum, but aim broadly at improving education for the disadvantaged; (2) the new programs are directed not at a school or a school district, but at millions of children, in thousands of schools in hundreds of school jurisdictions in all the states; (3) they are not conceived and executed by a teacher, principal, a superintendent, or a researcher-they were created by the Congress and are administered by federal agencies far from the school districts which actually design and conduct the individual projects.