Revisiting the Role of Organizational Effectiveness in Educational Evaluation

Abstract

Educational evaluation in America has its roots in two roughly parallel developments (Worthen & Sanders, 1973). The first was the work of Robert Thorndike, father of the educational testing movement. His interests in measuring the changes and developments of human abilities gave great impetus to the growth of measurement technology in the early decades of the 20th century. The second important development was the schools accreditation movement, which flourished in the later decades of the 19th century, establishing and formalizing an early interest in educational accountability. Thus evaluation as we know it today is derived from two distinct, yet complementary traditions: (a) the tests and measurement movement, which emphasized measurement technology and individual growth and development; and (b) the schools evaluation or accreditation movement, which emphasized organizational standards of quality. However, those two branches have diverged so sharply that one, the schools evaluation branch, is no longer commonly associated with evaluation at all. It has become a wholly self-sufficient enterprise, little changed from its original census orientation. For example, the data collected by the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education are primarily demographic, for example, number of faculty holding a doctorate, faculty-student ratio, number of courses in key curricular areas. The schools accreditation enterprise in this country has not pursued the notion of schools evaluation in the sense of organizational effectiveness.

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