Evaluation of a school district's secondary counseling program

Professional School Counseling, April, 2003 by Claire Cole Curcio, Christina Mathai, Jane Roberts

In this age of accountability, all facets of public education are undergoing scrutiny. High-stakes testing, a perceived increase in violence in schools, and tighter budgets combine to heighten both awareness and anxiety of parents, legislators, and other school patrons. School counseling programs, like every aspect of the public schools, are receiving close attention from the public and calls for accountability and evaluation of these programs can be expected to increase.

Evaluation of school counseling programs is not an advent of the millennium. School counselors have long been exhorted to evaluate their programs and to account for their time and effectiveness (Perusse, Goodnough, & Noel, 2001). In his influential book Guidance and Counseling in the Schools, Herr (1979) asserted that guidance programs "... should contain goals, objectives, activities, and student outcomes" (p. 141) and "... some evaluation should be included each year with periodic evaluation of the total program" (p. 142). Lombana (1985) noted that individual school counselors may be prevented from developing evaluations by time constraints, lack of knowledge of evaluation procedures, and anxiety regarding the possible outcomes. An externally based evaluation is of use to time-constrained practitioners whose expertise may not be evaluation. However, Hogan (1998) advocated involvement of the counselors in evaluation of their own programs as a way of keeping the counselor involved in students' daily lives. The American School Counselor Association (ASCA, 1998) addresses the issue of evaluation in Ethical Standard D1.e by advocating that school counselors "... assist in the development of ... a systematic evaluation process for comprehensive school counseling programs, services, and personnel. The counselor is guided by the findings of the evaluation data in planning programs and services." However, counselors may lack the time, the education, or the credibility to conduct their own program evaluations, especially if the competence or expertise of the counselors themselves is an issue in the evaluation.

The evaluation reported here used professionals who were not employees of the school system commissioning the evaluation. The use of evaluators from outside the system to review school counseling programs is an established way of conducting an evaluation (Schmidt, 1995), and precludes the involvement of teachers as evaluators, which is sometimes the chosen method, but outside the teachers' role (Studer & Sommers, 2001). Similarly, principals, although frequently the primary or only evaluators of counselors and counseling programs, usually lack background in counseling practice and are therefore unable to thoroughly, objectively, and professionally evaluate the counselors' goals, adherence to ethical guidelines, and daily activities, and often interpret the counselors' role differently than do the counselors (Fitch, Newby, Ballestero, & Marshall, 2001).

This article details the experience of three university-based external evaluators of a secondary school counseling program and suggests some methods that worked for this evaluation. These suggestions may guide other evaluation efforts, whether the evaluators be internal supervisors or administrators of a school system or external consultants such as counselor educators. The article focuses on the process, rather than the findings, of the evaluation, that others may find usable in their work settings or in their planning of external evaluations.

THE EVALUATION

The superintendent of a mid-sized (about 12,000 students) school district approached the first author, a counselor educator, about evaluating the secondary school counseling program in the district. Constant and intense criticism from parents to school board members prompted the superintendent's need for data and recommendations for changes in the school counseling program to answer these critics and, more importantly, to improve service to students and their parents. He determined that outside evaluators were needed both for their skills and for their credibility in making recommendations.

In response to the superintendent's request, the counselor educator, assisted by an educational research professor, prepared a brief proposal outlining suggested methodology, timeline for the work, form of the final report, and budget. Following acceptance of the proposal by the school board and superintendent, evaluation instruments were devised. Doctoral students, who had prior experience and background in conducting interviews and focus groups and in analyzing data, assisted in collecting, aggregating, and analyzing data. The counselor educator prepared and presented the final report.

The Evaluators

The evaluators for this program included a counselor educator with more than 20 years of experience as a school counselor and central office administrator, who served as primary evaluator, and two doctoral students, one in counselor education with school counseling experience and one in human development with extensive program management and evaluation experience. They were assisted in the design of the evaluation by an educational research professor with expertise in program evaluation in public schools. This partnership of evaluators followed the recommendation that interdisciplinary collaboration is considered an important component of the overall evaluation process (Hayes, Paisley, Phelps, Pearson, & Salter, 1997). None of the evaluators had any recent significant history with the school system, although the counselor educator knew the superintendent and was acquainted with some of the counselors and administrators through past professional association work and consulting with the school district.