Suchergebnisse

The school reform movement has done little to provide an accurate analysis of the production of inequality or the reproduction of social injustice in the public schools or the larger social order. The ideology that influences this movement has often prevented the realization of any notion of an egalitarian ideal, the elimination of inequality, or the improvement of those who are least well-off. I ask educators and evaluators of education reform efforts to reconsider critically their roles in social science research, to reclaim the battleground of public school reform by focusing on the democratic purpose of public schooling, and the institutional problems in educational programs and practice that often inhibit action toward this ideal. The first part of this article includes an extensive argument explaining the "why" of critical evaluation. The theoretical literature on inquiry in science and social science, the ideology of critical theory, critical social psychology, and Freirean pedagogy are consulted as additional tools for augmenting the practice, policies, and responsibilities of evaluators in education. I review three contemporary perspectives of evaluation in order to begin rethinking the purposes and functions that evaluation serves in education. It also demonstrates how mainstream and contemporary evaluations can be used to serve a particular set of social and political values. The second part of this article begins a preliminary journey toward describing the "how" of critical evaluation. Critical evaluators can fight for social justice by combining the merit criteria of state and federal public education law, and the methods of an adversary oriented evaluation in order to transform educational environments that serve the future potentials of all children. Therefore education involves the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world (Freire, 1985).

AbstractCluster evaluation is a collaborative method for evaluating the impact of a set of projects with similar goals and objectives. As the evaluation is constructed out of the shared visions, values, and directions of the cluster of projects, new roles and relationships for evaluators emerge.

This article deals with the relationship between established political conceptions about government reforms and experiences with reforms and their evaluation, the background being the change in Norwegian reform policy which has taken place in recent years. This change has increased our insight into how reforms are created in the state sector and has also shed light on the different functions of such reforms, highlighting the consequences of topical questions for understanding evaluation and the evaluation strategies which are used.

This study analyses how different types of system-level (or 'landscape') structural reforms in higher education have been designed and implemented in selected higher education systems. In the 12 case studies that form the core of the project, the researchers examine reforms aimed at: - Increasing horizontal differentiation between different types of higher education institutions (for example reforms to introduce or modify the role of universities of applied science); - Increasing vertical differentiation through increasing or decreasing positional or status differences between higher education institutions (for example, reforms aimed at concentrating research in a limited number of universities) and; - Changing institutional interrelationships between higher education institutions (for example, through mergers, the formation of associations of institutions). In each case, the researchers set out to understand the origins and objectives of the reforms examined, the why they were designed and implemented, the extent to which they achieved their objectives and the factors affecting success or failure. The overall objective is to provide policy makers at the European, national and institutional levels with policy relevant conclusions concerning the design, implementation and evaluation of structural reforms

Reforms designed to improve the quality of teaching by reforming personnel practices, such as pay for performance arrangements, usually run into opposition from well-organized teacher unions that can either block reform in the short run or undermine it over the longer term. The experience of a series of reforms that introduced collective and individual pay incentives for teachers in Chile from 1990 to 2010 provide a rare example of ongoing negotiation with the teacher union that resulted in an institutionalized structure of incentive pay for teachers as well as widespread attitudes of sustained support among teachers for performance pay. Chile offers an important example of how sustained change in incentive pay can be achieved through ongoing negotiation. Adapted from the source document.

Within the context of evaluation system of education quality in career courses that are organized at the Center for Security and Military Strategic Studies of the University of Defence in Brno, the article deals with course evaluation questionnaires. It demonstrates benefits of introducing online questionnaires, and a persistence of responses sets that are invalid in terms of internal imbalance. To filter out this undesirable natural phenomenon, a method was proposed for determining the consistency of responses sets. The outcomes lead to the goal to enhance quality as well as quantity of responses to evaluation questionnaires. In terms of quality, the intention is to continue filtering out invalid responses sets using the proposed method. In terms of quantity, the intention is to motivate the course participants to fill the evaluation questionnaire by dividing it in parts, so that they can experience the changes based on their responses yet during their course.

This article reflects on the relationship between evaluation and trust. Evaluation has become prominent in recent years as a way to control administrative action.The underlying assumption here is that administrative action, e.g. in the form of publicly funded programmes, requires control in order to gain or sustain its legitimacy.Two case studies of programmes of higher education reform in Germany, initiating so-called `virtual universities', are used to investigate how stakeholders experienced evaluation. Informants argued that there was too much evaluation, that confusion and competition arose about the roles of evaluation, and that little instrumental use occurred. This situation caused frustration and begs the question whether evaluation, intended to increase trust through systematic and transparent inquiry and rational decision-making, contradicted its own claims. It is argued that evaluation can be endangered by `inverse process use' or `process damage'.

Reforms designed to improve the quality of teaching by reforming personnel practices, such as pay for performance arrangements, usually run into opposition from well‐organized teacher unions that can either block reform in the short run or undermine it over the longer term. The experience of a series of reforms that introduced collective and individual pay incentives for teachers in Chile from 1990 to 2010 provide a rare example of ongoing negotiation with the teacher union that resulted in an institutionalized structure of incentive pay for teachers as well as widespread attitudes of sustained support among teachers for performance pay. Chile offers an important example of how sustained change in incentive pay can be achieved through ongoing negotiation.

Among the various reforms initiated by the post-Mao leadership in China, the most crucial for stability of the political leadership & continuity of the policy line is that of the bureaucracy. In the name of making the state apparatus more efficient for economic development, the central party leaders promoted to leadership positions a new set of cadres who are "revolutionized, better educated, professionally competent, & younger." Evaluated are the results of the reform in three important organs: the Central Committee, the central government ministries, & the provincial Party secretaryship. It is found that although a large number of the bureaucratic technocrats has replaced veteran cadres of the civil war era, the gains are temporary, & the regime's efforts to rationalize & institutionalize personnel management will encounter much more serious obstacles imposed by the structural conditions of the Leninist party-state. 4 Tables. HA.