ABSTRACT

This chapter offers a number of recommendations—a wish list of sorts for conducting studies that are designed to assess both implementation and impact. It illustrates the challenges to real-world educational evaluations. Some of the challenges are specific to the School Development Program, whereas others are generic to educational evaluation at large. The impact portion was designed as a randomized study in multiple urban school districts that each had developed a partnership arrangement with a local university or state department of education. The original design was created absent current information about the use of videotapes and absent objective assessments of the viability of the partnerships. The reorganization of the Office of Educational Research and Improvement at the US Department of Education is designed, in part, to promote sound educational research, through greater explicit reliance on rigorous research designs. Obtaining parent permission is an increasingly complex and time-consuming process in real-world educational evaluation.