Rist, Ray C.

(b. 1944, Carbondale, Illinois). Ph.D., M.A., Washington University, St. Louis; B.A. Psychology and Sociology, Valparaiso University.

Rist is Senior Evaluation Officer in the World Bank's Operations Evaluation Department. Previously he held positions at the U.S. General Accounting Office and the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare. He was Director of the Center for Policy Studies at George Washington University's Graduate School of Education and Human Development, and he has taught at George Washington University, Johns Hopkins University, Cornell University, and Portland State University.

Rist's influence in evaluation is wide and deep. His work has been influential in the development of evaluation within the public sector. His work has focused on issues of governance, policy implementation, policy tools, and public sector management strategies. He has also made substantial contributions as an education policy expert. His contributions in evaluation and the public sector are reflected in the many publications he has authored and coauthored (25 books and more than 125 articles), such as the International Atlas of Evaluation; Carrots, Sticks and Sermons: Policy Instruments and Their Evaluation; and Program Evaluation and the Management of Government. His long-standing work on educational policy is marked by a number of works, including Restructuring American Education; Desegregating Schools: Appraisals of an American Experiment; Invisible Children; and the recently reissued The Urban School: A Factory for Failure.

In his evaluation work, Rist has contributed to the legitimacy and expansion of qualitative methods in evaluation. He has also had a substantial impact around the world as a consequence of his work designing and building results-based monitoring and evaluation systems in many developing countries. He has contributed to the development of better governmental evaluation in the United States by twice being a member of teams that have built federal evaluation centers, once for the General Accounting Office and earlier for the Department of Health, Education and Welfare.

Rist was a senior Fulbright Fellow at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin (1976–1977). He received [Page 381]the GAO Comptroller General's Special Award, and he has received the Medal of Merit from the French parliament. He demonstrates his enthusiasm for baseball as a member of the Stan Musial Society.