Ninety-five Theses for Reforming Program Evaluation

Abstract

This book calls for a reformation in evaluation, a thorough-going transformation. Its priests and its patrons, as well as those who desire its benefits, have sought from evaluation what it cannot, probably should not, give. The proper mission of evaluation is not to eliminate the fallibility of authority or to bolster its credibility. Rather, its mission is to facilitate a democratic, pluralistic process by enlightening all the participants.

In their landmark book in the field, entitled Toward Reform of Program Evaluation, Lee J. Cronbach and seven of his colleagues argue the need for a comprehensive transformation of program evaluation. They provide their readers with an in-depth assessment of evaluation as it stood at the end of the 1970s. They point out a wide range of areas in program evaluation in need of improvement. They lay bare many issues, unwarranted assumptions, and problems associated with specific evaluations commissioned to inform public policy (e.g., the now-famous New Jersey Negative Income Tax study). They go on to propose an alternative way of conceptualizing program evaluation, a conceptualization geared towards facilitating the improvement of programs through efforts to enlighten the various parties to the program. Finally, they offer a wide range of suggestions designed to move the field of program evaluation in the direction they propose. Following the precedent of that earlier reformer, Martin Luther, they codified their arguments and recommendations into 95 theses.

These theses, along with their authors’ introduction to them, appear below. The ideas offered by the multidisciplinary team reach beyond Cronbach’s more methodological writings represented elsewhere in this anthology, integrating ideas about method in a broad theory of evaluation as a political process. A careful study of the theses and the supportive material should provoke useful discussion and debate, which can only help to improve the field of program evaluation.