Chances are, if you are looking through this web site, your
group is working to change something about your community to
reduce racism, privilege or oppression and their consequences
(see About Racial Equity). Many
people who do this work plan to evaluate it. They may choose
to evaluate their work to track progress, document results,
report to their constituents, reflect on and help manage their
work, or they may be told they have to evaluate their work as
a condition of funding or for other reasons. Regardless of why
a group chooses to evaluate their work, or what stage they may
be in, this web site is designed to help.
When we use the word evaluation in this web site, we are talking
about the steps people take to gather and examine information
about what they are doing and its results. Most of this web
site is concerned with the details of how to do that, focusing
especially on how to evaluate antiracism and inclusion types
of work, and on how to take into account the ways that race
and racism, privilege, oppression and power influence not just
your work, but also the evaluation of that work.
Here, we just want to say a few words about our philosophy
of evaluation.
Over the years, we have learned a couple of key things about
evaluation that we hope you will find helpful. They include:
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Evaluation can be a tool that helps you
do your work better. The steps people take to design an
evaluation can force them to be clear about what they hope
to accomplish, exactly what they think it will take to get
there, what are reasonable expectations for how long that
will take and how deep a change can happen given where you
start, what you plan to do, and other forces that will influence
the nature and extent of change. |
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People’s ideas about these things
are formed in part by their professional and personal experiences.
Our experiences depend, today at least, in large part on
the way our professional and personal lives have been shaped
by racism, oppression, privilege and access to power. So
racism, oppression, privilege and access to power always
influence evaluation. They influence the questions we choose
to ask, which findings we decide are important or unimportant,
how we make meaning of results and many other things. |
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Given that, it is better to be explicit
than to remain silent about the roles of racism, oppression,
power and privilege in evaluation. |
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For us, one of the biggest questions
for evaluation is “what constitutes success, and who
says so?” |
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Evaluation should build on the understandings
and assumptions of the people who are most affected by
the work, and those who are doing it.
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This means that it is always helpful
to engage many stakeholders, representing many different
perspectives, in designing, carrying out and interpreting
evaluation results. Participatory evaluation is one
way of doing this and there are others. |
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It also means that it is not useful
to use evaluation to impose an arbitrary and external
set of standards or benchmarks that are not understood
and accepted by the people carrying out the program,
service, or activity. |
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If evaluation is going to help a group
succeed, it is particularly useful to:
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Work backwards from key decision
points to develop the timing for evaluation –
so the information you need will be there when you
can use it to influence those decisions. |
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Try out your research questions
and ways of reporting or sharing results with the
evaluation audiences – before you design the
evaluation. When we are planning an evaluation, we
often ask key stakeholders what they would consider
compelling evidence of change – so we can make
sure to look for information of that kind as part
of evaluation. |
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Be very clear about what your
evaluation can and cannot tell people.
For example, many people will want you to tell
them whether or not your activities caused changes
in community conditions (for example, to tell them
if organizing parents to advocate for improved schooling
caused test scores of children in those schools
to change).
When we talk with people about an evaluation, we
try to be clear that most of the time an evaluation
can tell you two things – if test scores change,
and if your strategy to organize parents succeeded
in creating better or more advocacy for school improvement.
But without very sophisticated and expensive techniques
(like random assignment) most evaluations cannot
prove if organizing caused improved test scores.
Instead – you can design an evaluation that
will look at test scores over time and that will
look at how well organizing went and what it accomplished.
Then, it is reasonable to say whether or not organizing
“contributed” to changes in the schools,
but not whether they “caused” them.
This is the long way of saying – don’t
let people push you into saying your evaluation
can do something it can’t, and particularly,
don’t feel that every evaluation has to produce
“cause” and “effect” information.
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A lot of the time, people are doing things
that are very difficult to evaluate, given the current state
of the art in evaluation. For example, because racism has
never been eliminated in the United States, we do not know
exactly what it will take to meet many racial equity goals
and we do not know exactly what short-term outcomes will
lead to longer-term ones. |
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However, just because something is difficult
to evaluate does not mean it isn’t worth doing. And,
we shouldn’t limit what we try to do to just those
things we can evaluate. |
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See Also»
Common Evaluation Terms
under Terms and Vocabulary for
definitions of many terms used in evaluation and in this
website.
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