Post on 24-Jan-2023
transcript
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MARY E. CORCORAN LECTURE
MINNESOTA EVALUATION STUDIES INSTITUTE, 2009
The Politics of Accountability
Sandra Mathison
University of British Columbia
It seems that for the last ten years or so I have begun almost ever talk or
workshop that I have done with this query…
Who is accountable to whom, for what, through what means, and with
what consequences?
I would go on to illustrate the hierarchical nature of accountability relations. That
is, that accountability gives those with the power to grant authority to others the
privilege of asking those to whom they have given authority to be responsible
and report on their actions. And, I would further point out that this is a one-way
flow of accountability. Those who have power are not usually those who must
account for their actions.
I would also go on to argue that the mechanisms used for accountability
purposes are mostly too simplistic, driven by the interests of capital, and can be
corrupted to increase the perception of success in the absence of real success.
I would also argue that threats of punishment are counter-productive and strip
people of their natural and intrinsic motivations to do as well as they can, and
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that threats of punishment or public humiliation are a key factor in the
corruptibility of the means of accountability.
And then I would argue for a redefined accountability—I would argue for
something other than the outcomes based accountability that has taken hold of
the public (and much of the private) sector. A movement into which life has been
breathed by the Clinton era Government Performance and Reporting Act, and
which we see manifest in accountability schemes like No Child Left Behind. I
would argue for an approach that is more democratic, that disperses power and
authority, that uses more complex and nuanced mechanisms.
Today I want to interrogate this query in a little different way. I want
instead to ask what this question has to do with evaluation—or more generally,
what does evaluation have to do with accountability?
Never before has public concern and distrust been so widespread—in
both the public and private sectors, from schools to Wall Street, from the
manufacturing sector to health care. Public confidence in institutions to meet our
individual and collective needs has been deeply eroded. While once we had
confidence that professionals (like teachers, doctors, and accountants) and
leaders (like politicians and ministers) had deeply held and ethical commitments
to doing the right thing, too many transgressions have lead to a deep skepticism.
We are in what has been called the era of ‘new public management.’
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Let me set the stage a bit. How have we come to this new public
management and what is it? Until the late 1970s and early 1980s, accountability
was more an expectation than a process. In general, what is referred to as
professional accountability prevailed—the expectation that professional
judgement and action was informed by good reasons and an acceptance of the
authority of those providing the reasons.
Professional accountability is self-regulation by a group of professionals
and might be expressed like this…
Doctors are accountable to the certifying body of physicians, for providing
appropriate quality health care, through adherence to standards of
knowledge, practice and ethics established by the American Medical
Association [the doctors themselves], with the understanding that the
failure to live up to these standards will result in the lose of certification or
licensure to practice as a doctor.
While recent scandals are often cited as the reason for a shift away from
professional accountability, in fact, there are examples of what are now
commonly and widely held senses of inadequate or inappropriate professional
knowledge.
Let me give you an example.
In 1975, almost thirty-five years ago now, PL 94-142 or the Education for
All Handicapped Children Act was passed, legislation that required states to
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provide free and appropriate public education to all students with disabilities.
Previously, educational professionals had determined that children with
disabilities ought to remain at home, attend segregated special schools, or be
institutionalized—reasoning that public school classrooms were only appropriate
for children who were normal. Parents challenged the authority of educational
professionals and their reasons for their acts of exclusion, and parents became a
major force in the creation and passage of this legislation.
This example illustrates lose of confidence in professional judgement, and
also more fundamental disagreements about values, purposes, and practices
upheld by professions, especially when they conflict with the values and
purposes of other stakeholder groups. That the judgement of professionals can
be challenged and the singular privilege of professionals to be self-regulating be
disrupted by the interests of one or more stakeholder groups clearly signals that
accountability is a political process—one that results from competing and
coalescing interests.
So historically, both disagreements about whether the public good has
been served by professional accountability AND incidences of professional
misconduct, including but not limited to malfeasance, have lead to a
disintegration of professional accountability and the rise of a regulatory
accountability. Regulations, like PL 94-142, begin to take the place of educators’
professional judgement.
Challenges to professional accountability can and do come from many
different stakeholders.
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In the case of PL 94-142, parents championed the rights of their children
and all children with disabilities to receive a fair education in public schools. And
we are want to feel hopeful about what we sense is a more democratic
consequence. But it is important to pause and see that there are a host of
stakeholders who challenge professional accountability in the name of their own
interests, and we may not feel so warmly about all challenges.
For example, No Child Left Behind is a regulatory response driven
primarily by the interests of politicians and corporate CEO’s given a deep
dissatisfaction with the role of schools in preparing a skilled workforce that
contributes to the American global economic competitiveness. A number of
national summits and roundtables have occurred since 1996 and the people
participating in those summits have been state governors and business leaders,
and much less frequently educators. Indeed the final summit held in 2001 at the
IBM Conference Center in Pallisades NY that was the culminating event that
launched the passage of NCLB included only politicians and business leaders.
And special precautions were taken to avert widely publicized protests by
teachers and educational activists.
Politicians and business leaders dissatisfaction with schools lays blame
with educational professionals and is manifest in claims of inadequate
professional knowledge and skill and professional protectionism, such as
privileging longevity over excellence in job security. The consequence is the
same as with parental dissatisfaction with professional educators’ views on
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educating special needs children—a regulatory response to change what
happens in schools.
These regulatory responses are key to the new public management, or
what I call outcomes based accountability. Regulatory accountability might be
expressed something like this…
Schools are accountable to the federal government for demonstrating annual
yearly progress (or AYP) within all sub-categories of students as indicated by
state mandated achievement tests in literacy and math, and failing schools must
notify parents they are failing, develop a plan for improvement and/or undergo
restructuring.
Regulatory accountability is a shift to determinations about what
professionals should do that is external to the institutions within which they work,
rather than being decided by the professionals working within those institutions.
This form of accountability vests authority in governments, but not by simply
putting the government in charge. Rather, governments are agents that support
free markets by creating the conditions that allow markets to operate to maximize
effectiveness, profits and efficiency. Government regulations are the primary
means for creating these conditions.
This is the political theory of neo-liberalism.
Let me share a longish quote from Olssen that captures the role of
governments in neo-liberalism…
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[N]eo-liberalism has come to represent a positive conception of the state’s role in creating the appropriate market by providing the conditions, laws and institutions necessary for its operation. In the shift from classical liberalism to neo-liberalism, then, there is a further element added, for such a shift involves a change in subject position from “homo economicus,” who naturally behaves out of self-interest and is relatively detached from the state, to “manipulatable man,” who is created by the state and who is continually encouraged to be “perpetually responsive.” It is not that the conception of the self-interested subject is replaced or done away with by the new ideals of “neo-liberalism,” but that in an age of universal welfare, the perceived possibilities of slothful indolence create necessities for new forms of vigilance, surveillance, “performance appraisal” and of forms of control generally. In this model the state has taken it upon itself to keep us all up to the mark. The state will see to it that each one makes a “continual enterprise of ourselves” . . . in what seems to be a process of “governing without governing.” (Olssen, 1996, p. 340)
So whether you are a fan of neo-liberalism or not, this is the global political
context in which we find ourselves. And with that, a focus on outcomes based
accountability where the desirable outcomes are established by special interests
(often elites, and often capitalist, corporate elites) and fostered by governmental
regulation and surveillance.
In evaluation, the state role takes an even more sinister form. Not only do
government regulations facilitate definitions of what is good and right, but
additionally the US government has assumed the role of evaluator in the public
interest. This governmental role as evaluator is sometimes confined to programs
the government funds, such as the US Office of Management and Budget’s
system for evaluating and publicizing whether government funded programs work
or not. Expect More (http://www.expectmore.gov) offers to tell the public which
programs are performing effectively and ineffectively, as well as those about
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which the jury is still out.
But other government resources reach beyond government-funded
programs to let the citizenry know what works. The best example of this is the
What Works Clearinghouse, created in 2002 by the US Department of
Education’s Institute for Educational Science “to provide educators,
policymakers, researchers, and the public with a central and trusted source of
scientific evidence of what works in education.” In both cases, the government
assumes the role of telling the public what the best choices are. (How the
government knows what is best is something I will pick up a little later.)
There are, of course, private non-governmental agencies that offer similar
services to the public, such as SchoolMatters, a product of Standard and Poors
which is owned by McGraw-Hill Companies—one of the biggest producers of
educational tests. “SchoolMatters gives policymakers, educators, and parents the
tools they need to make better-informed decisions that improve student
performance. SchoolMatters will educate, empower, and engage education
stakeholders.”
And, in Canada, the Fraser Institute publishes school rankings for half of
the country’s provinces based on provincially mandated student achievement
tests because they contented that, “An educational market, one in which parents
choose their children's schools and schools compete more freely for students,
will produce better educational results for more students.” CanWest Global
Communications, the company that owns many Canadian daily newspapers,
implicitly supports this contention by publishing newspaper inserts with these
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‘reports’ of the quality of schools prepared by the Fraser Institute and relegating
alternative views to the op ed pages.
These examples are meant to illustrate the importance of the state’s role
within a neo-liberal political framework. A role that is critical in establishing the
new public management and fostering a coalescing of political and capitalist
interests into systems for managing and controlling public life.
What Does Evaluation Have to do with Accountability?
On the surface it seems that accountability and evaluation might be the
same thing, or at least that evaluation is the essential means by which
accountability happens. As evaluators, we should be all over this idea of
accountability, embracing the idea, knowing that what we have to offer will be
useful, and getting to work. But this is not so. Why do many evaluators resist
accountability, see accountability as an impediment to or contrary to their work?
A little deconstruction of the specifics of the accountability question might
give us some insight.
The clearest connection between accountability and evaluation is that
evaluation is the “means” that facilitates the determination of whether one has
acted in the ways expected. Consider, for example, this quote, which is typical in
the literature on accountability:
Accountability is holding someone responsible for what they are supposed to do. Evaluation is the documentation used to prove that what was
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supposed to be done, in fact, was done and to determine how well it was done. (McKenna, 1983).
But the literature on accountability also describes a variety of means that can be
used for accountability purposes. For example, the One World Trust identifies
four dimensions (which I take to be means) of accountability—evaluation is one
along with participation, transparency, and complaints & redress. Similarly, in his
discussion of accountability for non-government organizations, Ebrahim (2003)
identifies five means used in accountability—he includes evaluation along with
reports and disclosure statements, participation, self-regulation, and social
audits.
This suggests that evaluation is one among several possible means used
in accountability. But is this really the case? For example, every not-for profit
organization must annually prepare detailed reports for the IRS disclosing its
finances and organizational structure. Some may see it as a bit of a stretch to
describe the IRS’s audit of such disclosures as an evaluation, but what the IRS
does is to use an established set of characteristics and modes of practices (what
might be called criteria and standards) to determine if a particular 501C
organization meets the IRS expectations for proper and thus good conduct. Good
in the sense of being as it should be, rather than doing good things. Admittedly,
this is a weak evaluation, one that focuses on compliance rather than say the
value of the contributions the 501C makes in its domain of operations.
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So, I think it is reasonable to say that, in fact, all accountability requires
evaluation, that value judgements have a central role within accountability, that
accountability is all about making value judgements.
Sometimes this evaluation is weak and seeks only information that
confirms compliance with rules, regulations or expectations, but very often there
is a stronger sense of evaluation implied within accountability. To quote Dunsire’s
(1978) description of accountability within bureaucracies…
the account when rendered, is to be evaluated by the superior or superior body measured against some standard or some expectation, and the differences noted: and then praise or blame are to be meted out and sanctions applied. It is the coupling of information with its evaluation and application of sanctions that gives ‘accountability’ or ‘answerability’ or ‘responsibility’ their full sense in ordinary usage.
Although all accountability is evaluation the obverse is not true, that is, not
all evaluation is accountability. Making a value judgement does not in and of itself
imply that anyone is being held to account, nor that there are any consequences,
either good or bad, that ensue from the value judgement. While working in my
garden I may judge a rose a perfect rose—a value judgement that does not hold
me as the gardener or the supplier from whom I buy my roses to account and
that does not imply any consequences. It is simply a declaration of the value of
this rose based on accepted standards for a perfect rose.
Indeed we do evaluation for many purposes other than accountability, and
there in lies one of the sources of evaluators’ disquiet with accountability. All that
we do or want to do as professional evaluators is not in the name of holding
someone to account. In addition…
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we evaluate with the intent to improve things,
we evaluate to learn and appreciate,
we evaluate to build self-evaluation capabilities,
we evaluate to discern what needs are,
we evaluate so that an informed decision can be made.
These other worthy goals of evaluation get washed away by the evaluation as
accountability tide. And this is a denial of decades of theoretical and practical
work in evaluation, work that strives to find the good and make the not so good
better in more complex, often contextualized ways.
But back to the basic structure of accountability. That is, who is accountable to
whom for what by what means and with what consequences?
In professional accountability, evaluation plays a prominent role in two
ways. First is the accreditation of programs that educate professionals
adequately so they can be certified to practice their profession. Second is the
process of investigating and adjudicating accusations of professional misconduct
through investigations, usually internal investigations by specially appointed
persons or groups within the professional certifying bodies.
In a system of professional accountability, there is really no special role for
evaluators qua evaluators. Judgements about what is good and right are
structurally defined by the profession, and professionals themselves are seen as
best positioned to make those judgements. Citizen complaints about police are
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assumed to be best handled through internal police investigations of conduct,
rather than say by citizen review boards. Judgements about the quality of degree
programs to educate psychologists are made by psychologists, those who are
within the degree programs and peers from other institutions with similar
programs.
In regulatory accountability, evaluators do play a special role. I will return
to the issue of who is accountable to whom and for what, but for now let me
focus on the ‘by what means’ part of accountability. As I mentioned earlier, many
discussions of regulatory accountability list evaluation among several means by
which one is held to account. This construction equates evaluation with providing
information—designing and refining instrumentation that measures outcomes
specified by others, and overseeing the collection and analysis of data using that
instrumentation. The focus is on the technical aspects of managing and reporting
evidence and evaluators become technicians in this formulation.
But even more critical than equating evaluation with data management
and reporting, is the likelihood within regulatory accountability to have BOTH the
FORMS of data and data collection METHODS prescribed outside of the
evaluation context and prescribed by those with the authority to demand an
account of others. A contemporary, but now classic, example of this is the US
Department of Education’s 2003 directive about how evaluation of educational
programs ought to be done. Here is a quote from the Department of Education
directive…
Evaluation methods using an experimental design are best for determining project effectiveness. . . . If random assignment is not feasible, the project
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may use a quasi-experimental design with carefully matched comparison conditions. . . . For projects that are focused on special populations in which sufficient numbers of participants are not available to support random assignment or matched comparison group designs, single-subject designs such as multiple baseline or treatment-reversal or interrupted time series that are capable of demonstrating causal relationships can be employed. . . Proposed evaluation strategies that use neither experimental designs with random assignment nor quasi-experimental designs using a matched comparison group nor regression discontinuity designs will not be considered responsive to the priority when sufficient numbers of participants are available to support these designs (DOE, 2003, p. 62446).
The US Department of Education justified this methods directive by appealing to
a particular notion of what counts as rigorous inquiry, and by so doing directly
and successfully challenged the knowledge and experience of many professional
evaluators. While there are federal agencies that accept methodological diversity
(like the National Science Foundation, the Department of Justice and the Bureau
of Indian Affairs) there are many (like the Department of Education, the National
Institutes of Health, the Office of Management and Budget) that seek to regulate
methods by promoting a methodological monism. We don’t yet know how these
efforts to regulate what is an acceptable method will play out over time, but for
now what we see is the regulation of knowledge that is to be used in
accountability.
With the regulation of methods comes a concomitant valuing of parsimony
in regulatory accountability. Given the neo-liberal backdrop to regulatory
accountability there is a focus on simple parsimonious means for holding people
to account. Econometrics drives thinking in regulatory accountability and single
or at least a small number of indicators of quality are valued. The Dow Jones
Industrial Average, for example, stands as the indicator of economic health. The
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Dow opened at 7349 and closed at 7270, down 80 for the day. This statement is
widely accepted as a pretty good indicator of how the economy is doing. (I have
to say the indicator that is most compelling to me though is the bottom line on my
retirement statement!)
Within regulatory accountability a single or a few indicators are often
provided to evaluators OR… evaluators are asked to identify the best single
indicators to use to demonstrate accountability. In education, student
achievement scores on standardized tests have become de facto the evidence
for judging the quality of schools and schooling. And the idea that all you need is
standardized tests to hold teachers, administrators and schools accountable is
deceptively simple. It is a neat and contained system of who is being held
accountable and by what means with what consequences.
Richard Elmore describes this seductive formula…
“Students take tests that measure their academic performance in various subject areas. The results trigger certain consequences for students and schools—rewards, in the case of high performance, and sanctions for poor performance…. If students, teachers, or schools are chronically low performing, presumably something more must be done: students must be denied diplomas or held back a grade; teachers or principals must be sanctioned or dismissed; and failing schools must be fixed or simply closed” (Elmore, 2002).
The assumption is that the threat of failure will motivate students to learn
more, teachers to teach better, educational institutions to be better, and the level
of achievement to continue to rise. And all of this can be accomplished just by
collecting standardized achievement scores.
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Let me return to the ‘who is accountable to whom’ part of the
accountability query. In general, accountability relationships are hierarchical and
asymmetrical, and those who are held to account are granted the authority to do
their work by those to whom they are accountable. Additionally, this hierarchical
accountability relationship often has a fiscal dimension, where money flows from
those with power to those who have been granted authority to carry out the
wishes of those in power.
In professional accountability, professionals receive the authority to act as
professionals through certification and licensure that are granted by professional
associations and sometimes governmental agencies. In return for being granted
this authority, professionals agree to give account for their actions to those who
have granted the authority. For example, in British Columbia where I live,
teachers are licensed by the British Columbia College of Teachers. Their
authority to teach in an elementary or secondary school is granted by the College
of Teachers and, in turn, teachers are accountable to the College of Teachers for
proper, competent and ethical professional conduct. So, in many cases, there is
an acceptable and mutually agreed upon accountability relationship—this
relationship is institutionalized and rationalized.
But there are many areas in which this relationship is contested, and this
is especially so within regulatory accountability. This is because regulatory
accountability mostly entails a distance and disconnect between those who are
being held to account and those holding them to account. Mostly, those who
control accountability are separate from the organizational or institutional actors
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who are being held to account. For example, in the accountability relationships
established by No Child Left Behind, teachers and administrators working in
schools are held to account by the US Department of Education, which has no
specific role in or knowledge of the circumstances of any particular school. And
indeed, many would say ought not to have any say in education, which has
historically been a local matter.
Evaluators are accustomed to working in contexts where power
relationships are a factor in the evaluation process. So this aspect of
accountability is not novel to evaluation, but regulatory accountability
underscores this dimension. All evaluators confront possible dilemmas regarding
whose interests will be served—as manifest in what questions are asked, who is
involved, what kinds of evidence are collected, and who is privileged to share in
the evaluation. Within regulatory accountability though, evaluators, already cast
largely in a role as technicians, are less likely to be in a position to renegotiate
how interests are served or to disrupt the authority defined by the accountability
relationship.
A recent issue of New Directions for Evaluation is dedicated to an analysis
of the relationship between evaluation and the regulations of No Child Left
Behind. Both internal and external evaluators’ work becomes defined by the US
Department of Education’s definition of who will be accountable to whom. The
stories in this issue of NDE clearly illustrate how both the work of educational
professionals AND evaluators are defined by the Department of Education.
Evaluators working within this accountability framework cannot resist the
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hierarchy and through their participation in accountability reinforce asymmetrical
power relationships, and also affirm their role as technicians.
Even though all evaluators experience the hegemony of what Scriven calls
the “managerial ideology” evaluation as accountability intensifies this ideology
tremendously.
There is another dimension of the ‘who is accountable to whom’ part of the
accountability query worth noting. Individuals or groups of individuals are the
locus of control within accountability—success or failure is attributed to people.
Indeed, accountability is commonly seen as a search for blame when desirable
end states are not achieved. However, in many organizations and arenas of
social life, the individuals who are being held to account may have control over
only some of what effects outcomes.
Again, using education as an example, schools, and more specifically
teachers, are blamed for the achievement gap, for the failure of their schools to
make annual yearly progress. And, they are blamed even though there is plenty
of evidence that factors outside teachers’ control, like socio-economic status,
effect academic achievement as much as anything that happens while children
are at school.
This structure of holding individuals or groups of individuals to account is
not consistent with what evaluators generally do. Evaluators look at success and
failure within contexts, contexts that certainly include human resources but also
many other factors, and with an expectation that success or failure is almost
never simply attributable to one factor.
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If all accountability is evaluation, then regulatory accountability is a kind of
evaluation that I believe most evaluators are uneasy with. It is a kind of
accountability that de-professionalizes evaluation, recasting it instead as an
information gathering process to meet the needs of the special interests of those
in power, most especially coalitions of politicians and capitalists.
Well, so what? This is a pretty grim picture of the nature of evaluation
within the new public management. And, it often feels that evaluation is dying a
slow death from the malady of regulatory accountability. And, it IS in many many
contexts. And ALSO, in many many contexts in which evaluators work
accountability is not the primary kind of evaluation that is expected or desired.
The forms of accountability are a result of larger political forces,
accountability is a manifestation of social, economic and political values and
represent a for now, in these times set of socio-political relationships. I’ve traced
just a little of this historical development from a focus largely on professional
accountability to a focus on regulatory accountability. And, the forms of
accountability will change yet again, although I don’t have a crystal ball that tells
me when or how.
I can’t resist concluding with at least another possibility. I guess deeply
embedded in my cynicism lies an idealism that embraces hope and change.
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If all accountability is evaluation, how might accountability be different.
Different so that as evaluators we rest easier and work productively within the
conception of accountability and in our role as agents in accountability?
The form of accountability I would offer that might accomplish this is
pluralistic democratic accountability, an approach that asks stakeholders to enter
a compact of mutual, collective responsibility for particular domains of social life.
Such an approach to accountability places far greater emphasis on internal
accountability, that is, mutual responsibility within contexts and communities
where social actors can and do know each other, and in which there is real
participation in actions within a common domain. It is an approach that focuses
on learning and improvement, rather than blaming and punishing.
Pluralistic democratic accountability might look something like this… Governments, school administrators, teachers, parents, and the community are
accountable to one another for the education of children as demonstrated by
opportunities for all students to learn; student outcomes in cognitive, physical,
social and emotional domains; and the creation of positive learning oriented work
environments with the expectation continual improvement will be the outcome.
But can evaluators do anything to move us toward a pluralistic democratic
accountability? And, the answer is yes we can, but not easily.
Over the years I have written a number of articles and chapters that
analyze how evaluation can and ought to be a democratizing force in education.
But, the analysis applies to all contexts of public life.
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Evaluators need to assume leadership roles, ones in keeping with the
AEA guiding principle of “responsibility to the general and public welfare.” There
are two contexts in which adherence to this guiding principle can occur—in the
doing of a specific evaluation and as a professional evaluation community.
In a particular evaluation, evaluators cannot be technicians serving the
interests of decision-makers, but instead must accept responsibility for creating
an evaluation process that is in the public interest. There are approaches to
evaluation, like deliberative democratic evaluation, participatory evaluation, and
utilization focused evaluation, that seem to support this idea. And we as
evaluators have agreed to a set of standards for doing evaluation that ought to
be upheld. Like using multiple indicators, like including stakeholders, like making
our work useful, like focusing on improvement.
In general, what I am saying is that as evaluators we should take to heart
Lee Cronbach’s call for evaluators to be educators too. To educate others about
how evaluation can be done, how it can serve multiple interests and purposes
and to resist doing as we are told by those who hold the purse strings, sit in
elected offices, or occupy positions of power.
But how evaluation is done is not just a matter of local practice; it is also a
matter of public policy and, as such, evaluators’ participation in the public
discourse about the matter is an obligation. As professionals, and even though
we may not always speak with one voice, we must create opportunities to
participate in discourses that define the nature of accountability. These are
conversations about evaluation policy—the rules or principles that a group or
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organization or government uses to guide decisions and actions when doing
evaluation.
The American Evaluation Association offers some examples of this
engagement in discourse about evaluation policy in their statements on high
stakes testing and on educational accountability. This is not however always a
straightforward matter (as illustrated by the dissension within AEA over its
response to the US Department of Education’s endorsement of randomized
clinical trials as the gold standard for educational evaluation). This kind of
engagement will inevitably create conflict and discomfort. But, we need to learn
to embrace the conflict within our own professional community and stay
engaged. AEA has moved away from the strategy of making public statements
that might influence evaluation policy, but the interest in participating in the
discourse has not diminished. The forms of engagement are evolving.
As evaluators we might grumble about our practice within a regulatory
accountability framework defined by the new public management, fearfully
disengaging from the politics of accountability. And if all we do is grumble and
comply, then history will show us to be a weak profession with little commitment
to its own lofty guiding principles.
Instead, I encourage all evaluators to own our profession’s rhetoric of
working in the name of the public good, I encourage all evaluators to excite
debate and dialogue within our own professional community and in those