Minority Issues in Program Evaluation

A significant report on a critical topic, this classic volume of the New Directions for Evaluation series is now in print and available again. Racial and ethnic minorities are disproportionately the beneficiaries of many of the social programs evaluators are called upon to evaluate, yet they generally have little influence in defining the goals of these programs or in determining how the programs' real impact on their lives will be measured. The contributors to this volume contend that this lack of input reduces the effectiveness of both the programs and evaluators' attempts to analyze them, and offer a variety of approaches for addressing dominant-culture bias program design and evaluation. The first chapter offers a case study of an evaluation of education reform in Texas in which individuals targeted by the program were involved in its evaluation. The second chapter examines a multicultural education program in which individuals from the targeted minority communities were involved in every step of the process, from program planning and design through evaluation.
The last four chapters focus on specific methodological issues, including correcting cultural bias in standardized testing, the use (and misuse) of race as an explanatory variable in program evaluation, and dealing with the many cultural bias-related issues inherent in the evaluation of multicultural education programs. This is the 53rd volume of the Jossey-Bass quarterly report series New Directions for Evaluation.