Guiding Principles for Evaluators

Background and Development

[Page 760]Educational evaluation traces its origin to the domestic policies of the administration of U.S. president Lyndon Johnson. Under his leadership, the United States enacted a set of laws with the express purpose of eliminating poverty and ameliorating a host of other social ills; these initiatives are often collectively known as the Great Society. The federal government invested millions of dollars into programs in education, health care, urban renewal, housing, and other similar areas.

Unlike market-based enterprises that can rely on natural external markers of success, as well as internal and external systems that provide constant feedback, public sector programs often lack intrinsic mechanisms with which to ensure effective allocation of funding and means by which to judge their success. Members of Congress expressed concerns regarding these issues during debate on a key part of the Great Society legislation, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965. To address these concerns, Congress included in the ESEA a requirement that each grant recipient file an evaluation report that detailed the specific results of the program. This requirement of the ESEA is generally recognized as the event most responsible for the development of modern program evaluation.

Since the passage of the ESEA, program evaluation has developed into a full-fledged professional discipline. In the wake of the ESEA’s evaluation requirement, universities established programs specializing in training professional evaluators. In 1976, 12 professional associations concerned with ensuring the quality and consistency of program evaluation created the Joint Committee of Standards for Educational Evaluation and tasked it with developing a set of standards to be used by professional evaluators. The fruits of this endeavor, The Standards for Evaluations of Educational Programs, Projects, and Materials, was published in 1981. The third edition of this work was published in 2010. In addition to the Joint Committee of Standards for Educational Evaluation standards, a set of ethical guidelines was developed by the Evaluation Research Society and was published in 1982. These guidelines were updated and revised in 2004 and are made available by the American Evaluation Association as the Guiding Principles for Evaluators.

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