Culturally Responsive Evaluation

History

About 60 years ago, an African American evaluator, Aaron Brown, sounded the call for cultural responsiveness in educational evaluation, but his plea went unheeded. Brown persuasively argued that African Americans had special and critical needs due to their unique experiences in American society. He appropriately raised the question in the 1940s of whether there should be special considerations given when evaluating schools for African Americans.

Issues devolving from the consideration of multiple stakeholders have been around for a long time, as well. During the 1950s, Leander Boykin prophetically saw the importance of including the perspectives of multiple program stakeholders in conducting an evaluation. Boykin was the first African American to [Page 97]receive a Ph.D. in Education from Stanford University (1948), and he did postdoctoral work at Harvard University in 1957 and 1958. In one of several works on evaluation, Boykin provided a set of 10 guiding principles, characteristics, and functions of effective evaluation. One principle asserted that evaluation should be a cooperative effort that involved not only students, parents, teachers, and principals as important stakeholders in the school community but also others who played important roles but were typically overlooked, such as custodial and lunchroom personnel. He saw the need to involve custodial workers if one wanted to understand deeply the cultural context of a school being evaluated.

It would be an exaggeration to say that Ralph Tyler alone invented modern-day educational evaluation, but his name stands tall in the history of the field. Tyler challenged evaluation practitioners to move beyond mere achievement testing to reveal the merit and worth of classroom programs, curricular influence, and student growth. The enormity of Tyler's influence is undeniable.

Similarly, one can point to the seminal vision of Robert Stake in his early articulation of the parameters of a responsive evaluation in 1973. Stake argued persuasively for the inclusion of contextual issues beyond student achievement, teacher behavior, administrator leadership, and community descriptors. He maintained that the complete educational evaluation should be responsive to a host of influences that fall outside the ken of traditional approaches to educational evaluation. Stake's influence resulted in a broadening of evaluators' view of their task and a diminution of their reliance on quantification as the principal indicator of worth. Recent work by Stafford Hood has sought a further extension of the work of Tyler and Stake by positing an approach that embraces considerations of culture in evaluation designs.

The Current State of Culturally Responsive Evaluation

Educational evaluation must address issues relating to the influence of cultural context if practitioners are to be responsive to the settings in which their evaluations occur. Many evaluators (including Hood, Hopson, Greene, Kirkhart, Frierson, Senese, Hall, and LaFrance) assert that it is difficult, if not impossible, for evaluators to see, hear, and understand cultural nuance that differs from their lived experience. However, they do not see culturally responsive evaluation as being a matter of race or ethnicity having exclusive rights or insights because of their families of origin. Rather, they advocate a broad-scale, multidimensional, and multidisciplinary view of the issues relating to culturally responsive evaluation and call for a positive and helpful response from the field. It is a matter of acknowledging who knows what and how the field can use its collective talent, skills, and insight to make educational evaluation as effective as possible.

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