Evaluating Systemic Educational Reform: Facing the Methodological, Practical, and Political Challenges.

Evaluation is in part a science and in part an art. Evolving out of the experimental social sciences, evaluation initially tried to mimic laboratory sciences in methodology, rigor, and impartiality. Adopting the logical positivist framework, evaluators were data driven, objective, and quantitatively oriented. Today we are seeing an enormous change in what is meant by evaluation, the forms it takes, and the forces that operate upon it. Stuffelbeam (1999) identified twenty-two different approaches to evaluation that range from the traditional logical positivistic approach to ...