Book Review: Evaluation in Today's World: Respecting Diversity, Improving Quality, and Promoting Usability

Abstract

For those of us who teach program evaluation, it can be an exciting prospect to enter the summer with a new textbook to consider for inclusion in our fall courses. I had the good fortune to review Evaluation in Today’s World: Respecting Diversity, Improving Quality, and Promoting Usability by Veronica Thomas and Patricia Campbell. It is an accessible, comprehensive, and provocative text that is appropriate for inclusion in a number of courses that are typically taught in a program evaluation certificate sequence or other graduate curricula. The book is organized into 16 chapters, each of which includes learning goals and are replete with helpful visuals, case studies, suggested text reflection and discussion activities, and commentaries from evaluation scholars. The first half of the book explores the context and foundations of social justice, cultural competence, and program evaluation, while the second half of the book presents specifics for how to conduct socially just evaluation. For helpful reference, the book also includes the American Evaluation Association’s Guiding Principles (AEA, 2018) and the Joint Committee on Standards for Educational Evaluation Program Evaluation Standards (Yarbrough et al., 2010), as well as a Glossary of all the bolded terms included in the chapters. In the book, the reader encounters what one would expect to see in standard textbooks in evaluation, including the historical evolution of the field, influential scholars, and an overview of types of evaluation. However, what makes this text particularly compelling is that typical evaluation topics are explicated through the lens of social justice. Indeed, the book’s title matches its intent. Evaluation in today’s world means thinking and doing evaluation in what is unquestionably a racialized society where grave inequities exist and undemocratic relationships persist among people. The authors situate social justice at the heart of evaluation and assert that “evaluators have an ethical obligation to eliminate, or at least mitigate, racial (and other) biases” in our work (p. 42). They acknowledge that evaluators cannot “solve the racism problem,” but entreat us to “at least elevate this harsh reality in the discourse on the eradication of social problems that derive from a national legacy of structural racism, exploitation, and bigotry,” and warn, “evaluations that ignore these factors obscure the impact of social forces on social problems” (p. 218).