Public Good and Private Interest in Educational Evaluation

Abstract

So reads the caption on a poster I received upon completion of an evaluation of an accelerated secondary school program. Over a six-month period I worked with this school and its stakeholders (including students, teachers, parents, school administrators, and graduates) to evaluate this accelerated program for precocious eighth and ninth graders. The evaluation was stakeholder based, the types of evidence collected evolved as the evaluation proceeded, the students became interested in the process and worked with me to develop data collection skills and then collect data themselves. The fi nal report and where to go from the results was a collaborative effort among the stakeholder groups. This is typically the kind of educational evaluation I do, although there is a wide range of approaches used in educational evaluation. But for this work, I did not get paid. The school has no money for evaluation. The school district has no money for evaluation. The evaluation approach the school wanted is not a priority or publicly funded. Consider this quote from the Identifying and Implementing Educational Practices Supported by Rigorous Evidence: A User Friendly Guide, published by the U.S. Department of Education (2003): Well-designed and implemented randomized controlled trials are considered the “gold standard” for evaluating an intervention’s effectiveness, in fi elds such as medicine, welfare and employment policy, and psychology. This section discusses what a randomized controlled trial is, and outlines evidence indicating that such trials should play a similar role in education.