Evaluation in Today’s World. Veronica G. Thomas
under which the institution operates; and providing feedback for public relations (Madaus & Stufflebeam, 1989).
In comparison to the work of others of his time, Tyler’s work offered a greater variety in evaluation procedures including the use of examinations, questionnaires, interviews, observational evidence, checklists, rating scales, anecdotal records, pre- and posttests, and various other types of evidence and records (Bloom, 1986). The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)—still the only assessment that measures what U.S. students know and can do in various subjects across the nation, in the states, and in some urban districts—was first successfully conducted in 1969 under Tyler’s leadership.
Hidden Figures and Histories in Early-20th-Century Evaluation
Across many fields, too often, the historical contributions of persons of color are dimmed in the limelight of white males, at best, or totally omitted, at worst, from accounts of significant events in this country. Increasingly, there are efforts to tell the untold accounts and hidden stories across various fields. For example, the nonfiction book Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Who Helped Win the Space Race (Shetterley, 2016) tells the incredible untold story of four brilliant African American female mathematicians, Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson, and Christine Darden, who worked at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Langley Research Center as “human computers” in the 1940s, 1950s, and beyond. In some respects, accounts of the historical evolution of evaluation, too, share the problem of ignoring the early contributions of persons of color and omitting critical evaluation studies that examined issues aimed toward ameliorating discrimination and social injustice. For example, between 1935 and 1951, 25 African Americans received their doctorates in education and conducted evaluations for their dissertations, but their work was, for the most part, unrecognized in its social and educational significance for African Americans (Hood, 2001; Hopson & Hood, 2005).
In critiquing Marvin Alkin’s (2004) historical assessment of evaluation theory and practice published in his Evaluation Roots volumes and depicted as an evaluation tree with three limbs (discussed in more detail in Chapter 4), Hood (2017) states that
Alkin’s historical contribution to evaluation theory and practice has consistently been discussed in my evaluation courses over the years. However, as I looked at the illustration of Alkin and Christie’s (2004) “evaluation tree,” I found no disagreement with roots…. Yet, what stood out to me was that Chen [Asian] was the only evaluator of color to be identified on this evaluation tree. As I looked at this evaluation tree and its branches, I could not help but think that there were other mighty trees in this evaluation forest which were either hidden from view or simply outside the view of this illustrator. (p. 265)
As Stafford Hood states in his Voices From the Field interview, it is important that evaluation history is told in a manner that is more diverse and inclusive than it has been in the past.
Voices From the Field
Stafford Hood: Toward a More Inclusive History of Evaluation
If we are going to tell the history of evaluation, then we must tell the whole story. A more inclusive evaluation history is critically important because it lets evaluators, particularly young evaluators of color, know that the field has a rich history and that their work stands on the shoulders of lots of other folks. I started by looking from the vantage point of my own heritage and roots as an African American and saw that we were truly part of the story of evaluation history, and that story needed to be told. In doing this work, what I found was fascinating inasmuch as during the early years of the 1930s and 1940s, African Americans were conducting evaluations using sophisticated methods such mixed methods, although they didn’t name it as such. There were African American scholars, such as Leander L. Boykin, Reid E. Jackson, Aaron Brown, and others, navigating the community, having a cultural reference, and providing examples of how to conduct large-scale evaluation studies. The work of early African American pioneers in evaluation illuminated stories of social injustice during that particular time through their evaluation work especially related to segregated schools. They were committed to doing work that was for “the cause” and work that was culturally responsive and socially responsible. Such evaluations provide examples of the struggles faced by African Americans to get this work done and the impact of that work. However, uncovering untold stories of evaluation’s early history does not stop here. We must continue uncovering the footprint of African Americans and other people of color in the history of evaluation.
Stafford Hood is the Sheila M. Miller Professor of Curriculum and Instruction and a professor of educational psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and founding director of the Center for Culturally Responsive Evaluation and Assessment (CREA). Veronica Thomas conducted the interview in the fall of 2019.
Hood and colleagues, in the evolving Nobody Knows My Name project, continue to research the historical contributions of African Americans who engaged in evaluation in the early years (prior to the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision). The title of his project was borrowed from Baldwin’s (1961) collection of essays under the title, Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son, because, as Hood (2017) points out, “it spoke more directly to what I felt after being told there were no early African American evaluators or simply that no one knew of any” (p. 263). The Nobody Knows My Name project was conducted to “retrieve, from near obscurity, the work of early contributors and pioneering African American scholars who have been excluded from what is taught as the history of educational evaluation research in the United States” (Hood, 2017, p. 263). In the sections that follow, we discuss some of the scholars that Hood and colleagues refer to in the Nobody Knows My Name project. Borrowing from the title of Shetterly’s (2016) book, we refer to these individuals as “hidden figures” in the field.
During the 1930s–1950s, African American scholars used their platform as a vehicle to carry their message of social inequalities and social responsibility to the research and evaluation community, in particular, and society, more generally. While the work of such scholars may not have had an impact on the evaluation theory and practice of their time, their work did “respond to a social agenda that addressed the intentional disentrancement and undereducation of African Americans during the period between Plessy v. Ferguson, where the Supreme Court declared the concept of separate but equal legal, and Brown v. Board of Education” (Hopson & Hood, 2005, p. 89). Work by these scholars also paved the way for the development, recognition, and use of more culturally responsive approaches to evaluation. Some of these scholars, such as Charles H. Thompson and Reid E. Jackson (both highlighted in this section), received doctoral degrees from elite centers for training in educational research and evaluation such as the University of Chicago and Ohio State. One common thread among such scholars is that they conducted and disseminated research and evaluation studies that offered evidence for the negative impact of racism, inequities, and legal sanctioning of segregation on the life outcomes of African Americans.
As part of our effort to highlight the identified “hidden figures” in this chapter, we included a photo for each.
Courtesy of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University Archives Howard University, Washington DC
Ambrose Caliver
Ambrose Caliver was the first African American to earn a PhD (in 1930) in education from Columbia University. He taught at Fisk University, where he also became the university’s first African American dean in 1927. In 1930, Caliver was appointed to the new position of Senior Specialist in the Education of Negroes in the U.S. Office of Education by President Herbert Hoover. In 1932, when Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected president, Caliver remained in his post and became a member of Roosevelt’s “Black Cabinet,” being the first African American to receive a permanent appointment