Evaluating Education Programs: Are We Getting Anywhere?

This paper asks whether all the current attention being given to educational evaluation and all the activity going on indicates real progress in the output of evaluation and its use in the policy process. The paper reviews the brief history of educational evaluation and gives a qualified "yes" as an answer to the question, noting: significant progress in the funds and people being devoted to evaluation; improvement in the organizational location of the evaluation function in Federal agencies; increased use of more sophisticated evaluation methodology; the beginnings of the use of experimentation as a developmental precursor to the launching of national service programs; and the completion of a number of large-scale educational evaluations with major policy implications. The paper concludes by noting that despite real progress, serious administrative, methodological, and political problems threaten the continued expansion of evaluation studies and their use as a major factor in policy development and program administration. (Author)