ABSTRACT
A government ministry responsible for immigration contracted with a number of non-profit immigrant-aid organizations to deliver ‘English as a Second Language’ (ESL) training for recent immigrants. As a check on how well these organizations were doing the job it told them that their programmes would be evaluated on the basis of their costs per student and the percentage of those signed up for classes who reached a certain score on a standardized test of English language proficiency at the end of their training. This way the Ministry felt it could carry out a ‘cost-benefit’ assessment of programme outcomes and thus feel assured that the money spent was being used efficiently and producing the results desired.
