Evaluation in Today’s World. Veronica G. Thomas
Caliver advanced to other positions within the U.S. Office of Education including (a) a 1946 promotion to specialist of Negro higher education, (b) a 1950 promotion to assistant to the commissioner in the Office of Education, and (c) a 1955 promotion to chief of the adult education section. Because this was the first time African Americans had been employed in the Office of Education, Caliver and his staff were objects of curiosity. They were sometimes tolerated, ignored, and rarely accepted (Wilkens, 1962).
Despite systemic racism, during his 32-year tenure in the U.S. Office of Education (1930–1962), Caliver made significant contributions to federal evaluative inquiry of African American education during the pre-Brown era. He worked tirelessly to raise national awareness about the inequities and disparities in education between Blacks and whites, especially in the rural South, by traveling extensively throughout the country surveying and documenting the funding failures of public schools.
Perhaps Caliver’s most influential works were the national studies that he headed in the 1930s that provided data that illuminated educational inequalities in 20th-century U.S. education. These include the (a) National Survey of Teacher Education, (b) National Survey of Secondary Education, (c) National Survey of the Vocational and Educational Guidance of Negroes, and (d) National Survey of the Higher Education of Negroes. Further, Caliver compiled the national Statistics of the Education of Negroes from 1933 to 1934 and again from 1935 to 1936. Caliver’s work is credited with opening the door to systematic inquiry by African American researchers and evaluators (Hopson & Hood, 2005).
Reid E. Jackson
Reid E. Jackson has been identified as “the first bright light of the African American evaluation community” (Hopson & Hood, 2005, p. 90). In 1938, Jackson received his PhD in education from The Ohio State University, being the fourth African American to achieve this status. He held various positions over his career including, for example, secretary of the Southern Negro Conference for Equalization of Educational Opportunities (1944–1946), administrative dean at Wilberforce University (1949), and professor at several Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) including Talladega, Alabama State, West Virginia State, Central State, and Morgan State. Hood (2001) identified Jackson as one of the earlier pioneers in educational evaluation, and later, Hopson and Hood (2005) described the significance of Jackson’s work as providing “one of the earliest glimpses of culturally responsive evaluative judgments” (p. 96).
Courtesy of Kentucky State University Special Collections and Archives.
Jackson’s evaluations of segregated schooling for African Americans in Kentucky (R. Jackson, 1935), Florida (R. Jackson, 1936), and particularly Alabama (R. Jackson, 1938, 1940a, 1940b) provide concrete examples of an evaluator designing and implementing evaluations where race and culture are central considerations. Between 1935 and 1940, he published 14 scholarly articles focusing on evaluation of secondary schools for African Americans and teacher training programs, both of which he argued should serve as vehicles to further democracy. One of Jackson’s conclusions from the evaluation of segregated schooling for African Americans in Kentucky was that the “curricula of the public high school do not adequately meet the demands for a proper vocational preparation of the student” (R. Jackson, 1935, p. 191). Similarly, Jackson (1940b, p. 207) concluded from his evaluation of Alabama segregated schools that “the challenge to secondary education for the Negro in Alabama includes not only preparation for existing vocations but also the development for latent possibilities of the Negro as a contributing factor in a democratic society.” From these selected examples, it is clear that Jackson’s work provided significant insights to educational evaluations aimed toward social justice ends.
Rose Butler Browne
Rose Butler Browne was the first African American woman to graduate (in 1921) from Rhode Island College (now the University of Rhode Island) and the first African American woman to receive a doctorate in education (in 1939) from Harvard University. She is the first known African American woman to have had an evaluation project as the focus of her dissertation (Hood, 2001) and, as a result, is acknowledged as an early African American female pioneer in evaluation (Frazier-Anderson & Bertrand Jones, 2015). Browne was deeply concerned about African American children’s failure to reach their age norms in reading proficiency. Because of this concern, she evaluated the effectiveness of the Craig Method, which adapted many of the teaching strategies of the Montessori program to the specific needs of children in American culture. Browne believed that the Montessori tools would introduce children living in poverty to materials that supported their development and encouraged their curiosity.
Courtesy of the University Archives, University of Rhode Island Library.
During her career, Browne was on the faculty at various colleges including Virginia State College (Richmond), West Virginia State College (Institute), and Bluefield State College in (Bluefield) West Virginia. As a pioneer for social justice, Browne obtained national publicity when she refused to send students for teaching in West Virginia because the state’s board of education was paying African American teachers less than white teachers. The publicity and subsequent shortage of teachers led to a change in the policy. In 1969, Browne coauthored (with James W. English) her autobiography, Love My Children: The Education of a Teacher.
Aaron A. Brown
As the third African American to receive a PhD in education from the University of Chicago, Aaron A. Brown, and his work toward social justice ends, places him among the African American scholars who contributed to the educational evaluation literature during the 1940–1960 Tyler years (Hood, 2001). Later in his career, Brown served as president of Albany State College (1943–1954), one of three HBCUs in the university system of Georgia. Eleven years after his presidential installment, Reid was fired by the Board of Regents of the university system because of his involvement in the voter registration drives for Albany’s African American citizens. Brown’s dissertation (in 1944), “An Evaluation of the Accredited Secondary Schools for Negros in the South,” included an evaluation of the 93 accredited secondary schools for African Americans living in the South. He sought to find out how well the schools were performing when measured by the best objective criteria available during that time by comparing data on the accredited secondary schools for “Negroes” with normative data on other types of secondary schools.
Reprinted with permission of Albany State University Libraries, Archives, Ram Scholar Repository.
That in 1931 the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools agreed to accept the responsibility for the accreditation of colleges and secondary schools for African Americans and subsequently supported an evaluation of the school’s status was historic. Brown’s (1944a; 1944b) dissertation was carried out under the general supervision of Ralph Tyler and others, and it was considered an outstanding contribution that was subsequently published into a book (Brown, 1944c) by the University of Chicago Press. Wright (1945) pointed to an important evaluative question of the time that Brown sought to answer: What is the quality of work being done by these schools, which represent the best among such institutions for Negroes in the Southern region? Brown conducted analysis of his evaluative findings against the backdrop of the socioeconomic setting of schools for African Americans. His evaluation has been hailed as a needed contribution to the literature concerned with providing optimal educational advantages for the African Americans in the country, the majority of whom were living in the South (Wright, 1945). Hood (2005) stressed that, more than 60 years ago,
Aaron Brown called for cultural responsiveness in educational evaluation but his plea was unheeded. Brown persuasively argued that African Americans had special and critical needs due to their unique experiences in American society. He appropriately raised