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Americans worry continually about their schools with frequent
discussions of the "crisis" in American education, of the
"failures" of the public school systems, and of the inability of
schools to meet the current challenges of contemporary life. Such
concerns date back at least to the nineteenth century. A thread
that weaves its way through the critiques of American elementary
and secondary schools is that the educational system is not serving
its children well, that more should be done to enhance achievement
and higher performance. These critiques first began when the United
States was industrializing and were later amplified when the
Soviets and Japan were thought to be grinding down the competitive
position of America. At the start of the twenty-first century, as
we discuss globalization and maintaining our leadership position in
the world economy, they are being heard again. The Urban School: A
Factory for Failure challenges these assumptions about American
education. Indeed, a basic premise of the book is that the American
school system is working quite well-doing exactly what is expected
of it. To wit, that the schools in the United States affirm,
reflect, and reinforce the social inequalities that exist in the
social structures of the society. Stated differently, the schools
are not great engines for equalizing the existing social
inequalities. Rather, they work to reinforce the social class
differences that we have had in the past and continue to have in
more pronounced ways at present. Rist uses both sociological and
anthropological methods to examine life in one segregated
African-American school in the mid-western United States. A
classroom of some thirty children were followed from their first
day of kindergarten through the second grade. Detailed accounts of
the day-by-day process of sorting, stratifying, and separating the
children by social class backgrounds demonstrates the means of
ensuring that both the poor and middle-class students soon learned
their appropriate place in the social hierarchy of the school.
Instructional time, discipline, and teacher attention all varied by
social class of the students, with those at the bottom of the
ladder consistently receiving few positive rewards and many
negative sanctions. When The Urban School was first published in
1973, the National School Boards Association called it one of the
ten most influential books on American education for the year. It
remains essential reading for educators, sociologists, and
economists.
Americans worry continually about their schools with frequent
discussions of the "crisis" in American education, of the
"failures" of the public school systems, and of the inability of
schools to meet the current challenges of contemporary life. Such
concerns date back at least to the nineteenth century. A thread
that weaves its way through the critiques of American elementary
and secondary schools is that the educational system is not serving
its children well, that more should be done to enhance achievement
and higher performance. These critiques first began when the United
States was industrializing and were later amplified when the
Soviets and Japan were thought to be grinding down the competitive
position of America. At the start of the twenty-first century, as
we discuss globalization and maintaining our leadership position in
the world economy, they are being heard again.
"The Urban School: A Factory for Failure" challenges these
assumptions about American education. Indeed, a basic premise of
the book is that the American school system is working quite
well-doing exactly what is expected of it. To wit, that the schools
in the United States affirm, reflect, and reinforce the social
inequalities that exist in the social structures of the society.
Stated differently, the schools are not great engines for
equalizing the existing social inequalities. Rather, they work to
reinforce the social class differences that we have had in the past
and continue to have in more pronounced ways at present.
Rist uses both sociological and anthropological methods to examine
life in one segregated African-American school in the mid-western
United States. A classroom of some thirty children were followed
from their first day of kindergarten through the second grade.
Detailed accounts of the day-by-day process of sorting,
stratifying, and separating the children by social class
backgrounds demonstrates the means of ensuring that both the poor
and middle-class students soon learned their appropriate place in
the social hierarchy of the school. Instructional time, discipline,
and teacher attention all varied by social class of the students,
with those at the bottom of the ladder consistently receiving few
positive rewards and many negative sanctions.
When "The Urban School" was first published in 1973, the National
School Boards Association called it one of the ten most influential
books on American education for the year. It remains essential
reading for educators, sociologists, and economists.
Ray C. Rist is a senior evaluation officer with the Operations
Evaluation Department of the World Bank. He has held senior
positions in both the legislative and executive branches of the
United States government as well as teaching positions at Cornell
University, Johns Hopkins University, and George Washington
University.
""The Urban School" is a timely and much needed wake-up call to a
educational policy and contemporary social problem that urgently
needs to be addressed across the country and in every urban school
district."--"The Bookwatch"
Did evaluation meet the challenges of the COVID-19 crisis? How were
evaluation practices, architectures, and values affected? Policy
Evaluation in the Era of COVID-19 is the first to offer a broad
canvas that explores government responses and ideas to tackle the
challenges that evaluation practice faces in preparing for the next
global crisis. Practitioners and established academic experts in
the field of policy evaluation present a sophisticated synthesis of
institutional, national, and disciplinary perspectives, with
insights drawn from developments in Australia, Canada and the UK,
as well as the UN. Contributors examine the impacts of evaluation
on socioeconomic recovery planning, government innovations in
pivoting internal operations to address the crisis, and the role of
parliamentary and audit institutions during the pandemic. Chapters
also example the Sustainable Development Goals, and the inadequacy
of human rights-based approaches in evaluation, while examining the
imperative proposed by some authors that it is time that we take
seriously the call for substantial transformation. Written in a
clear and accessible style, Policy Evaluation in the Era of
COVID-19 offers a much-needed insight on the role evaluation played
during this unique and critical juncture in history.
Structured schools, free schools, graded schools, ungraded schools,
no schools at all-the conflicts over public education in America
rage on, for contemporary schools have not lived up to our
expectations. The essence of the criticism reflected in the essays
in this volume is that America's dual educational goals-free
inquiry and social mobility-are not being met. Instead of producing
enlightened citizens capable of high social and economic mobility,
our schools have become warehouses of children stored as
commodities, docile and immobile.
For governments to be successful in achieving their objectives,
they need to select the correct policy instruments. This volume
addresses the role of policy instruments in achieving policy
objectives.Policy Evaluation provides a systematic assessment of
the impact that public policy evaluations have on the governance of
democratic societies. This book emphasises the impacts of policy
evaluations on the formulation, implementation and accountability
functions of governments. At all three phases of the policy cycle,
there is a need for coherent and systematic evaluation. This book
demonstrates how such evaluations can be conducted and the
opportunities for their subsequent utilization.
The basic premise of this book is that the conversation on the
future of development needs to shift from a focus on poverty to
that of inequality. The poverty emphasis is in an intellectual and
political cul de sac. It does not address the fundamental question
of why people are poor nor what can be done structurally and
institutionally to reduce and eliminate it. The various chapters
illustrate in the context of various countries and sectors around
the world, the significant contributions that evaluators can make
in terms of improvement of the analytical framework, analysis of
the performance and results of specific programs and projects, as
well as assessing and designing better public management systems in
terms of poverty and inequality reduction. Beyond the specific
contributions presented, three characteristics characterise those
evaluations to be relevant for poverty and inequality analysis: a
global-local approach: Global to move beyond disciplinary
boundaries and consider cross-cutting issues, local to account for
the diversity of countries, sectors, institutions and cultures
considered; a problem-solving orientation: The issue evaluated is
the core focus and determines the choice of evaluation methods to
analyse this issue from a variety of angles; an evolutionary
approach: Chapters presented are from iconoclasts who do not have
any pre-established theory or school of thought to defend. This is
the result of openness of mind and ability to adapt the analytical
framework, the evaluation methods, and the interpretation of
results in a constant interaction with the stakeholders. Such
characteristics make evaluation a domain that can help understand
better complex issues like poverty, inequality, vulnerability, and
their interactions as well as propose a relevant and useful theory
of change for public policies and projects to improve the plight of
a large part of the world population in industrialized and
developing countries alike.
The presence of turbulence in multiple areas of our society-food,
fuel, and finances-being but three critical areas presently being
impacted means that long-held assumptions are no longer true, that
the past is not prologue, and that the future is not clear. And
enter into this unstable present the discipline of evaluation-a
discipline formed and shaped in the past fifty years of stability,
little turbulence, and strong assumptions that everything will go
according to plan. If things do not go well, it is because of
either a poor theory of change on how to bring about positive
outcomes, or weak efforts at implementation. It is not because of
the stormy present upsetting our quiet past. As it is, conventional
evaluation behaviour and beliefs are ill suited for these times.
The transformational nature of the 'Arab Spring' is just one arena
in which it is clear that a business as usual approach to
evaluation is entirely inappropriate. The papers in this volume are
from the 2011 Global Assembly of the International Development
Evaluation Association (IDEAS). Nearly 350 development evaluators
from eighty-five countries came together in Amman, Jordan to
discuss and analyse the consequences of turbulence on evaluation.
The intent of these papers is to systematically assess what changes
have come during this time of turbulence and how these changes are
impacting the craft of development evaluation. To be clear: this
book is not about how to assess the impacts of crises on
development and on people's lives. It is about the meaning of a
changed world and changed assumptions on the concepts and methods
used in evaluation.
In the first section of this book, four chapters explore how
evaluation can influence and interact with the change process in
policy and institutional development. Wijayatilake recalls a
convincing and riveting story about how evaluation was introduced
in Sri-Lanka and what kind of striking results could be achieved in
a few years through a progressive pragmatic approach and strong
leadership. Wiesner reviews the role of evaluation in the formation
of macroeconomic policy in Latin America and outlines the role of
demand for improved results and performance and of the
accountability from the politicians, the private sector and civil
society and, in the end, the population. Dimitrov proposes a 7 step
approach for tacking institutional Performance evaluation and
applies it to the case of the Black Sea Trade and Development Bank.
Jaljouli addresses the challenge of the integration of development
strategy and the evaluation process and uses Dubai as a case study.
In the second section of this book, five chapters present a variety
of lessons learnt and good practices in Evaluation Capacity
Building (ECB). Heider presents a structured approach to capacity
development working at three levels: individual training,
institutional development, and an enabling environment and suggests
moving from capacities to capabilities. Agrawal and Rao identify
various factions influencing the use of evaluation results and show
in the case of India how capacity building was used to increase
this use. Andriantseheno addresses how an M and E system for a
major development program can be set up as part of a programmatic
approach using the case study of the Environment/Rural Development
and Food Security program in Madagascar. Porter outlines the
potential of the helping approaches an evaluation capacity
development strategy and uses the Bana Barona/Abantwanu Bethu
project in South Africa to prove his point. Clotteau et al. review
major challenges in ECB and present a variety of ECB strategies to
design and implement Results-Based National M and E systems,
building upon a number of experiences in Africa, Asia, and Latin
America. The third section of the book discusses new perspectives
on ECB. Picciotto outlines a path for the future of development
evaluation on the basis of a review of emerging endogenous and
exogenous trends. By surveying recent theoretical developments in
ECB, Nielsen and Attstroem map the perspectives offered by the
contributors in terms of scope, purpose, definitions, and methods
and relate key findings and recommendations to the ECB framework
offered by Heider' chapter. Van den Berg illustrates how evaluation
capacity has been developed and could be further developed in a
critical area for the future, i.e. in environment and development.
From a review of the first and second sections of the book,
Dahlgren underlines that building up evaluation capacity requires
not only competence and quality, but taking into account the
political and institutional context, cost aspects, the relative
importance between learning and accountability, and the differences
and similarities between monitoring and evaluation. Finally,
following a review of the same papers, McAllister explores the
interface between the evaluation function and organizational
leadership in setting results strategy and the limitation of
results approaches as implemented by the international development
community. Overall, the stimulating comparative analysis of the
papers presented in sections 1 and 2, questions and own thoughts on
perspectives for ECB in the future made by those senior evaluation
specialists allow for a more thorough and nuanced book.
Ray Rist uses his skills as a participant-observer in the classroom
to make us understand the first few years of school experience of
one group of children. One of the traditional sources of American
pride has always been the upward mobility afforded its citizens
through mass public education. Regardless of income, race, or
background, all children are supposedly given an equal opportunity
to learn and thereby advance into a share of the good life. In this
longitudinal study of a group of black children attending a de
facto segregated urban school, Ray C. Rist demonstrates that this
cherished belief is unfortunately another myth that desperately
needs to be reevaluated. The study on which the report is based was
conducted over a three-year period in one of the St. Louis public
schools. Beginning with the initial kindergarten experience of the
children, it follows them with day-to-day observations through the
middle of second grade. The subtle (and not-so-subtle) "sorting
mechanisms," which begin with the children's table assignments the
first week of kindergarten, are traced from year to year, teacher
to teacher, until they have become, as Dr. Rist observes, an almost
immutable caste system. Though these classifications are ostensibly
formed according to the intellectual ability of the children, Dr.
Rist observes, an almost immutable caste system. Though these
classifications are ostensibly formed according to the intellectual
ability of the children, Dr. Rist points out how the teachers (all
of whom are black) use such cues as social class, dress, speech,
and social behavior to sort the children into groups. That the
children quickly learn to use the same cues in their own
interactions is also demonstrated. Much of the report contains
actual dialogue between the teachers and the children which vividly
captures the flavor of the classroom situation. Dr. Rist writes
with warmth and compassion for the children caught in a society
that values superficialities they are too young to control and with
sympathy for the teachers who must cope with overcrowding, constant
interruptions, and petty bureaucracy before they can begin to
teach. The reality of his observations will be apparent to anyone
who has ever taught (or been taught) in a public school; their
implications are a sobering critique of the reinforcement of
socioeconomic inequality.
'The Road to Results: Designing and Conducting Effective
Development Evaluations' presents concepts and procedures for
evaluation in a development context. It provides procedures and
examples on how to set up a monitoring and evaluation system, how
to conduct participatory evaluations and do social mapping, and how
to construct a rigorous quasi-experimental design to answer an
impact question. The text begins with the context of development
evaluation and how it arrived where it is today. It then discusses
current issues driving development evaluation, such as the
Millennium Development Goals and the move from simple project
evaluations to the broader understandings of complex evaluations.
The topics of implementing 'Results-based Measurement and
Evaluation' and constructing a 'Theory of Change' are emphasized
throughout the text. Next, the authors take the reader down 'the
road to results, ' presenting procedures for evaluating projects,
programs, and policies by using a 'Design Matrix' to help map the
process. This road includes: determining the overall approach,
formulating questions, selecting designs, developing data
collection instruments, choosing a sampling strategy, and planning
data analysis for qualitative, quantitative, and mixed method
evaluations. The book also includes discussions on conducting
complex evaluations, how to manage evaluations, how to present
results, and ethical behavior--including principles, standards, and
guidelines. The final chapter discusses the future of development
evaluation. This comprehensive text is an essential tool for those
involved in development evaluation."
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