In Defense of Program Evaluation

Abstract

On March 12, 1986 and for the next few days, newspapers in Canada were full of stories on the Final Report of the Ministerial Task Force on Program Review (Task Force on Program Review, Final Report, 1986). Many of those articles had disparaging things to say about federal program evaluation: references to the general poor quality of evaluations and “useless” and “self-serving” evaluations abound. The articles by Christopher Waddell and Hugh Windsor on March 12, 1986 and by Bruce Little and Jeffrey Simpson on March 13, all in the Globe and Mail are examples.