Research news and Comments: Reinvigorating Program Evaluation at the U.S. Department of Education
Abstract
Reinvigorating Program Evaluation at the U.S. Department of Education pending on program evaluation by the U.S. Department of Education exceeds $40 million per year, a tripling of the budget over the last five years. This represents a considerable analytic investment. The challenge is to use these funds wisely to produce information that improves current program and future policy-making. This article discusses this challenge and describes principal evaluation studies for each major program area. Following enactment of numerous federal education programs during the late 1960s and early 1970s, program evaluations were looked upon as a tool to identify which programs worked and which didn't. Yet many of these evaluations failed to produce the information required to alter either program or policy, as four independent reviews (Boruch & Cordray, 1980; Pincus, 1980; Raizen & Rossi, 1981; and U.S. General Accounting Office, 1977) reported a decade later. These reports were quite critical of the department's evaluations and cited several problems. One criticism was that evaluations showed a preoccupation with measuring overall program impacts, particularly test score changes. While achievement outcomes are important, they don't tell the whole story. "Black box" evaluations that ignore program processes are particularly frustrating in that, by