Management Consulting Case Study. Research on Evaluation Program. Paper and Report Series. No. 74.

A set of studies done for the Washington State Superintendent of Public Instruction (WSPI) constituted a case study testing the conjecture that management consulting is potentially cost effective in some areas of educational evaluation. The case study involved first interviewing 22 respondents from four WSPI constituencies (educators, employers, the legislature, and parents) to identify their major concerns, then deriving analyses of data related to the concerns from a WSPI data bank, and finally producing draft reports on the analyses. The data bank comprises data from the national "High School and Beyond" study augmented by additional Washington information and includes results of surveys of 3,645 10th and 12th graders in 65 Washington high schools. The test resulted in six draft reports on student plans for work and college, employment-related coursework, special students, extracurricular activities, knowledge of post-high school funding programs, and family influences. The researcher concludes that the case study did not show whether management consulting was more or less cost effective than normal evaluation in WSPI, because of a lack of controls for comparison. A postscript by WSPI's director of testing and evaluation, Dr. Alfred Rasp, is attached. Also provided in appendices are the six draft reports. (RW)