Joint Committee on Standards for Educational Evaluation

The Joint Committee was created in 1975 and is a coalition of major professional associations concerned with the quality of evaluation. Sponsoring organizations have included the American Association of School Administrators, American Counseling Association, American Educational Research Association, American Evaluation Association, American Psychological Association, Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, Canadian Evaluation Society, Canadian Society for the Study of Education, Consortium for Research on Educational Accountability and Teacher Evaluation, Council of Chief State School Officers, Council of the Great City Schools, National Association of Elementary School Principals, National Association of Secondary School Principals, National Council on Measurement in Education, National Education Association, National Legislative Program Evaluation Society, and the National School Boards Association. The sponsoring organizations appoint equal numbers of committee members to represent perspectives of evaluation specialists and users. The Joint Committee is housed at the Evaluation Center, Western Michigan University. The Joint Committee is accredited by the American National Standards Institute.

[Page 214]The Joint Committee has issued three sets of standards for evaluations that are now widely recognized: The Personnel Evaluation Standards (1988), The Program Evaluation Standards (2nd ed., 1994), and The Student Evaluation Standards (2003). Each set of between 21 and 30 detailed standards requires evaluations to meet requirements for utility, feasibility, propriety, and accuracy. The joint committee reviews and updates each set of standards approximately every 5 years.