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"On January 15, 1975, the Reverend Jesse Jackson was leading a demonstration around the White House to protest the lack of jobs for black youths. As the demonstrators marched, Jackson was shocked to discover that many of the black youths marching with him were drunk or on drugs, many of them ""out of control."" Abruptly, he called a halt to the demonstration and sent the marchers home. Within a few months, Jackson launched a national campaign in the urban high schools of the nation to save the black youths of his country, to get them off drugs and motivate them to work hard, study in school, develop self-discipline, and become successful in American society. A program called PUSH for Excellence, or PUSH/Excel, was an outgrowth of his Operation PUSH organization. Society had no solutions for the black teenagers whom Jackson was trying to help, and his efforts were highly praised, at first, by the media and government officials."

Background: Over decades American society has become increasingly fragmented, distrusting, and unequal. Distrust and inequality interact with institutions performing improperly to weaken the society. Purpose: To suggest ways to strengthen evaluation's role in a changing society Setting: Evaluation has entered a post normal phase where evaluations are losing credibility and effectiveness. Intervention: Analyze the changing society and suggest adjustments that evaluators might make. Research design: Collate and synthesize empirical studies about society and the implications for evaluators. Data collection and analysis: Collect and interpret seminal empirical economic, sociological, and political studies of beliefs and inequality in the United States. Findings: To strengthen the potency of evaluations of any type, evaluators could act as moral fiduciaries, practice transparency, cultivate cognitive empathy, focus on deep stories and deep values, and mitigate inequalities in the evaluation space. They can act as critics of evaluation practices inside and outside the evaluation space. They should avoid technical, social, and situational biases, including racism, sexism, and conflicts of interest, to increase the honesty and credibility of evaluations. They should not allow career concerns to prevent them from doing the right thing. These professional ethics and practices can be applied singly or collectively to most evaluation approaches to strengthen the evaluator's role and address major societal problems. Keywords: moral fiduciary; cognitive empathy; post normal; inequality; transparency; distrust; deep stories; values

AbstractThis chapter focuses on evaluations conducted through a social justice lens. Ernest House, who is located on the valuing branch of the Evaluation Theory Tree, focuses on justice as equality. He examines the Women Affirming Motherhood program description and considers what approaches might lead to an egalitarian evaluation that helps the program in its efforts to expand. In particular, House proposes a collaborative evaluation team, an investigation of causal factors including racial framing, and presentation of findings through compelling scenarios and stories.

AbstractThe book Evaluating with Validity (House, ) broadened the evaluation field's conception of validity by contending that evaluations should be true, coherent, and just. Untrue, incoherent, and unjust evaluations are invalid. The working ideas were argument, coherence, and politics. Truth is the attainment of arguments soundly made, beauty is the attainment of coherence well wrought, and justice is the attainment of politics fairly done. For the truth criterion, it wasn't designs or correlations that determined validity, but rather the validity of the arguments that supported the use of the designs and correlations. The broader conception of validity grew from addressing problems encountered in conducting evaluations. This chapter traces the origins of the ideas and the social context from which they emerged. It contends that these criteria still apply, though the contents of the criteria have changed somewhat and the context has changed substantially.

AbstractThe conflicting interests of evaluators are biasing the findings of some evaluations and experiments, even technically rigorous studies. One improvement would be to emphasize evaluator and investigator conflict‐of‐interest threats in conceptions of validity. Such discussions could suggest ways to assess and avoid conflicts of interest. I explore the possibilities in one highly regarded framework, the Campbellian conception of experimental validity. However, all evaluations and experiments, whatever their methods, are vulnerable, and all conceptions of validity should address such threats. © Wiley Periodicals, Inc., and the American Evaluation Association.

The Bush administration has systematically suppressed and distorted scientific findings to conform to its ideological agenda. Unfortunately, this practice has carried into educational research and evaluation, including the Institute of Education Sciences' What Works Clearing Clearinghouse, a unit that purports to screen studies that are "scientific."

AbstractThe handling of potential stakeholder bias distinguishes evaluation theorists from one another and from practitioners.