House, Ernest R.

(b. 1937, Alton, Illinois). Ed.D. Education, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; M.S. Education, Southern Illinois University; A.B. English, Washington University.

House is Professor Emeritus in the School of Education at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Previously, he was at CIRCE at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He has been a visiting scholar at UCLA, Harvard University, and the University of New Mexico, as well as at universities in England, Australia, Spain, Sweden, Austria, and Chile.

His influence on the field of educational evaluation and policy analysis is felt both nationally and internationally. He has contributed substantially to a growing discussion on the role of values, ethics, and social justice in evaluation, as well as to metaevaluation, evaluative reasoning, and the philosophical basis of evaluation. His work has helped alter the discourse in evaluation from one of technique to one that regards evaluation as a powerful social practice that should embody the values of democratic society. His work has been influenced by John Rawls'Theory of Justice, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's The New Rhetoric, Roy Bhaskar's Realist Theory of Science, and the work of Michael Scriven, Robert Stake, and Barry MacDonald. He has conducted numerous evaluations, critiques, and studies, including an assessment of environmental education policies in Europe for the OECD; a 5-year study of the evaluation office in the National Science Foundation; an assessment of the Michigan Accountability Program for the National Education Association; a critique of the National Follow Through Evaluation for the Ford Foundation; and a critique of the evaluation of Jesse Jackson's Push/Excel program for the U.S. Department of Education.

He is the author of many journal articles, chapters, and books, including Values in Evaluation and Social Research (with K. Howe), Where the Truth Lies, Schools for Sale, Professional Evaluation: Social Impact and Political Consequences, Jesse Jacksonand the Politics of Charisma, Evaluating With Validity, Survival in the Classroom (with S. Lapan), and The Politics of Educational Innovation. House was Coeditor of New Directions in Program Evaluation and a featured columnist for Evaluation Practice. In 1999 and 2000, he was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. He is also the 1989 recipient of the Harold E. Lasswell Prize in Policy Sciences and the 1990 recipient of the Paul F. Lazarsfeld Award for Evaluation Theory from the American Evaluation Association.