A Vision of Evaluation that Strengthens Democracy

Over the relatively short history of professional evaluation, those working in the field have directed considerable attention to both a vision of democratic approaches to evaluation and practice wisdom about how to realize that vision. In Europe, the democratic evaluation model of Barry MacDonald (1987) stands out. He argued that ‘the democratic evaluator ’ recognizes and supports value pluralism with the consequence that the evaluator should seek to represent the full range of interests in the course of designing an evaluation. In that way an evaluator can support an informed citizenry, the sine qua non of strong democracy, by acting as an information broker between groups who want and need knowledge about each other. The democratic evaluator must make the methods and techniques of evaluation accessible to non-specialists, that is, the general citizenry. MacDonald’s democratic evaluator seeks to survey a range of interests by assuring confidentiality to sources, engaging in negotiation between interest groups, and making evaluation findings widely accessible. The guiding ethic is the public’s right to know. Saville Kushner (2000) has carried forward, deepened and updated MacDonald’s democratic evaluation model. He sees evaluation as a form of personal expression and political action with a special obligation to be critical of those in power. He places the experiences of people in programs at the center of evaluation. The experiences and perceptions of the people, the supposed beneficiaries, are where, for Kushner, we will find the intersection of Politics (big P – Policy) and politics (small p – people). Much of evaluation these days (i.e. logic models, theories of action, outcomes evaluation) is driven by the need and desire to simplify and bring order to chaos. Kushner, in contrast, embraces chaos and complexity because democracy is complex and chaotic. He challenges the facile perspectives and bureaucratic imperatives that dominate much of current institutionally based evaluation practice. Over and over he returns to the people, to the children and teachers and parents, and the realities of their lives in program settings as they experience those realities. He elevates their judgments over professional and external judgments. He feels a special obligation to focus on,