Ethics Involved in the Evaluation of Bilingual Education.

This paper maintains that evaluation of bilingual programs must not only be true, it must also be just. The evaluator's perception of justice will affect how he/she will determine program effectiveness; consequently, it will color findings and recommendations. Bilingual education programs are, in fact, social action programs, as defined by the Elementary Secondary Education Act; therefore, they demand appropriate evaluation methods. The first model discussed, the egalitarian-utilitarian approach, is found inadequate because utilitarian ethics stress the overall needs of individuals in a society with particular emphasis on satisfaction of upper-class needs. These ethics contradict bilingual program goals, which stress the special and individual needs of students. It is suggested that an evaluation system based on intuitionist/pluralist ethics would be more just. Intuitionist/pluralist ethics have a multiplicity of principles for making judgments, with no priority rules for weighing judgments against each other. The case study approach, incorporated into an intuitionist/pluralist ethical model, is described and advocated as a model which will be effective because the findings will have been collected and validated for a particular audience and will include opinions and evaluations of persons who are actively involved in the program. (AMH)