ABSTRACT
The National Institute of Education’s advocacy of the stakeholder approach resulted from decades of criticism of evaluation practice. For more than twenty years, observers have noted serious shortcomings in the manner in which evaluations were conducted. Almost everyone associated with the evaluation of social programs seems to have written a critique of some aspect of the enterprise. Indeed, it sometimes seems that more papers have been published criticizing evaluation practices and procedures than reporting the results of studies conducted. Educational evaluators have been in the forefront of the criticism industry. For example, with dramatic sweep, Guba (1969) titled one early paper ‘The Failure of Educational Evaluation.’
