Evaluation in Today’s World. Veronica G. Thomas
of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) incorporated evaluation into its programs earlier than many other federal agencies. Some notable activities that moved evaluation forward at the CDC, as well as expanded to the field, include
publication of the widely used Framework for Program Evaluation in Public Health (1999), which was designed to be a practical step-by-step tool for conducting effective program evaluation;
creation of the first chief evaluation officer position in 2010;
development of the Program Performance and Evaluation Office, which consolidated program evaluation, performance measurement, and planning, previously dispersed across the CDC, under a single high-level office;
creation of the CDC Evaluation Fellowship Program (under auspices of the Program Performance and Evaluation Office); and
implementation of an annual CDC Evaluation Day (under auspices of the Program Performance and Evaluation Office).
Source: www.cdc.gov/eval/
Shift in the Quantitative–Qualitative Debate
In the spring of 2002 Evaluation Exchange, Coffman summarized a conversation that she had with Michael Quinn Patton where he stated that one major recent breakthrough in evaluation over the past 15–20 years was the end to the qualitative–quantitative debate. Since 2000, there has been considerably more emphasis on the use of mixed methods or integrating qualitative and quantitative approaches in a single evaluation study or series of studies to understand an evaluation problem. While qualitative and quantitative approaches, in isolation, each have strengths and weaknesses, evaluators have argued that a stronger, more comprehensive account of what is happening within a program can be ascertained when combining the methods in comparison to the conventional evaluation approach of relying only on one method (e.g., Greene, Benjamin, & Goodyear, 2001; Mertens & Hesse-Biber, 2013). Chapter 11 covers mixed methods in detail.
Increased Emphasis on Social Justice and Diversity
Probably one of the most notable shifts in the evaluation field that gained increased prominence in the 21st century is more attention to issues of culture, social justice, and, to a lesser degree, race/racism in both evaluation theory and practice (e.g., Hood, Hopson, & Frierson, 2015; Kirkhart, 2005; Samuels & Ryan, 2011; Thomas, 2011; Thomas & Stevens, 2004; Thompson-Robinson, Hopson, & SenGupta, 2004). Even beginning in the late 1990s on into the 2000s, the AEA put forth a number of initiatives to expand attention to issues of culture, social justice, and, to a lesser degree, race/racism that will undoubtedly have a historical impact on the future of evaluation. Many of these initiatives are summarized in Table 3.4 or are discussed throughout this book and, therefore, are not presented again in this section.
An important milestone in relation to culturally responsive evaluation was the creation of the Center for Culturally Responsive Evaluation and Assessment (CREA), founded in 2013 by Stafford Hood and located in the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This includes an international community of scholars/practitioners who promote a culturally responsive stance in all forms of systematic inquiry including evaluation, assessment, policy analysis, applied research, and action research. The CREA hosts an annual international conference, as it seeks to produce a body of informed practitioners, published scholarship, professional development opportunities, technical assistance resources, and advocacy advancing cultural responsiveness across inquiry platforms and settings. See https://crea.education.illinois.edu/# for more information.
Culturally responsive Indigenous evaluation is another area that gained momentum in the 21st century. The culturally responsive Indigenous evaluation contribution to the field is that it provides theoretical, methodological, and practical evaluation designs and strategies for carrying out a culturally responsive evaluation of services and programs provided for and/or designed by Indigenous peoples. It began as a practical method and strategy used to include culture, language, community context, and sovereign tribal governance when conducting research, policy, and evaluation studies and emerged as a paradigm that is situated within and a partner to culturally responsive evaluations (Bowman, 2006). Culturally responsive Indigenous evaluation is intended to be a transformative evaluation model that provides flexibility to be implemented in diverse Indigenous contexts. Over the last decade, culturally responsive indigenous evaluation resources have become more readily available to academia and evaluation practitioners within the mainstream literature (Waapalaneexkweew [Bowman] & Dodge-Francis, 2018).
Support for Capacity Building
There are too numerous examples of federal and foundation support for evaluation capacity building to discuss in this chapter. The NSF is one federal agency that has substantially contributed to the evolving status of the evaluation field, having funded evaluator training centers, institutes, and programs in STEM areas to address the shortage of evaluators. These included collaborations and/or support for university degree programs and short-term professional programs for faculty and advanced graduate students. Some centers that received substantial federal funding and devoted part of their efforts to evaluation include facilities at Northwestern University, the Evaluation Center at Western Michigan University, and the Center for Instructional Research and Curriculum Evaluation at the University of Illinois. In early 2000s, the NSF funded an Evaluation Training Institute at Howard University for midlevel evaluators designed to broaden their knowledge of evaluation models, methods, standards, and guiding principles, as well as raise their awareness and understanding of the influence of culture and context. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), W. K. Kellogg Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Colorado Trust, and Annie E. Casey Foundation have also played a major role in efforts to diversify both the talent pool of evaluators and the theories and methods utilized by evaluators through either its funding to professional associations or its own initiatives.
Summary
Clearly, evaluation in some form has evolved over the entire history of people’s existence, although systematic program evaluation began to come into its own in the early to mid-20th century. Program evaluation is very much rooted in the sociopolitical and legislative climate of its time. Although there were many explicit racialized experiences (e.g., racism, Jim Crow laws) for persons of color, particularly African Americans, during evaluation’s early history, such events were not adequately reflected in the social programming or evaluations of that time. Further, there has been little discussion of the evolution of evaluation through a social justice lens when recounting its history.
Over the years, the federal government has played an enormous role in the historical evolution of evaluation. Datta (2003) identifies eight influences of the government on the evaluation profession and of evaluation on the government, including increasing the
demand for internal evaluation within the federal government;
demand for internal evaluation among the recipients of federal support;
demand for external evaluation among the recipients of federal support;
specification of methods, designs, and measures to be used;
support for the development of evaluation as a profession;
creation of opportunities for employment of evaluators;
leadership for evaluation emulated by nongovernmental entities such as private foundations; and
support of evaluation capacity such as evaluation training, development of standards and definition of evaluation, and a professional infrastructure.