Judith Rényi, Executive Director, NEA Foundation for the Improvement of Education, Washington, DC

Beverly Parsons; has written a book that every school, every district, and every organization that works with schools is going to want to have. This step-by-step guide demystifies evaluation, a term that usually brings chills to the spines of educators. In Beverly Parsons’ hands, however, evaluation becomes a highly effective tool for ordinary school people to use as they learn, grow, change, and improve their schools for student success. This book is truly the result of many years of experience in working with teachers, administrators, schools, and helping agencies, to help them set visions and goals, plan strategies for change, and track the results. The writer anticipates the problems and pitfalls that can derail otherwise well-intentioned reforms. She has been in real schools and helped real teachers and principals, parents, and community members to struggle with change. Her practical experience and advice anticipates the issues that are sure to arise as educators set about trying to improve their work and keep track of whether they have actually made a difference.

Evaluative Inquiry is a how-to for ordinary educators to help them work at the highest levels of professionalism. The book touches on teachers’ core values. Teachers’ work is never done. They rarely know for sure whether they have succeeded in carrying out new ideas. Beverly Parsons’ book will help them to track their innovations step by step and still keep their eyes on the ultimate prize, student outcomes. This book should become the constant companion of anyone interested in seeing schools change for the better. It helps practitioners organize their work so they can find out if they are indeed changing, and if the change is making a difference.

Practical advice, visual as well as narrative approaches, charts, plans and diagrams, and clear presentations in laymen’s terms all help the reader to demystify “evaluation.” The book takes the sting out of “accountability,” and instead makes the accountability process of greatest use to those in the throes of trying to improve their schools. Beverly Parsons takes note of differing learning styles for readers and practitioners, offering lively anecdotes, case study examples that help the reader visualize the evaluation inquiry taking shape step by step, and even dramatized dialogues, all of which help to make this subject accessible. The charts and graphs, descriptions of activities to undertake at every stage of the evolving process of change, help guide the user through the thickets.

Whether you are planning a limited or one-time innovation in a few classrooms or whole-school or district-wide change; whether you are responding to new state mandates, new school goals, or want to bring in new learning opportunities that are not required but would enhance your students’ learning, this book can help you chart your course. A core part of the approach extends the numbers of people in any school who are directly involved either in carrying out or in studying the work beyond just a few individuals with a great idea. This expansion of the numbers involved and careful guidance of their work to assure high quality, data collection, and informed decision making helps to structure their work and vastly improves their chances for success.

All education reform is well-meaning; with the help of this book reform can reach actual success.

Michael Fullan, Dean, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Most attempts at school reform have failed. Even those that have succeeded have been short lived and/or have failed to go to scale (Fullan, 2001a). In our own work and in examining similar research we have coined the 3-6-8 rule, i.e., it takes about three years to turn around an elementary school from poor performance to good performance as measured by student progress; it takes six years to turn around a high school, and about eight for a whole district.

There are three problems with these findings as valid as they are. First, in the face of complex, urgent problems, many people feel that the timeline is too long. They ask whether these timelines can be accelerated, say, reduced by half. Second, only a small proportion of schools or districts that should be improving are actually doing so. This is the problem of scale. Third, and most revealing, is that it takes a great deal of effort to accomplish the turnaround which can be undone almost overnight as two or three key people leave. Thus, sustaining reform remains elusive.

One of the prime reasons that reform cannot be accomplished is that people, especially groups of people, lack the capacity to engage in continuous reform processes. This is where Beverly Parsons’ Evaluative Inquiry: Using Evaluation Promote Student Success comes into play. As Parsons notes, there is a great deal of "information" available. Data bases without a means of acting on them amounts to information glut. As we and others have observed, information only becomes knowledge when it is socially processed (Brown and Duguid, 2000; Fullan, 2001b). In other words, people (teachers and principals, for example) must work together to move from information to action. For that they need to conceptualize how to go about it, and they need a set of skills and processes which will enable them to move forward.

Parsons’ evaluative inquiry framework is a gold mine of ideas and designs. She bases the framework on three design components which effectively address the flaws in the 3-6-8 rule. One design element addresses ‘Quality’, i.e., does the initiative promote high quality learning? A second focuses on ‘Sustainable Growth’, i.e., can the initiative be sustained? And the third takes up the issue of going to scale on ‘Expansion’, i.e., can the initiative be expanded beyond a small endeavor?

There are a number of significant features of Parsons’ Action and Inquiry Map. First, it is based on vision as an evolving force. Second, it focuses on both student learning and teacher learning, demonstrating their close reciprocal relationship. Third, it distinguishes between short-term learning outcomes and long-term teacher learning outcomes. Fourth, and unlike most inquiry models in the literature, the model maps out system infrastructure in three main sections: 1. structure and processes, 2. resources, and 3. culture. Structures/processes contains several key elements (e.g., district/school leadership, assessment, professional development). Resources includes district funds as well as human resources. Culture incorporates norms about diversity, learning about many cultures, and so on. A rating form is provided in which readers can rate their own district on the 16 dimensions of structure, resources, and culture. Parsons then outlines a process and set of steps for analyzing supporting and inhibiting factors in relation to the 16 dimensions. This enables her to map out four key patterns distinguishing among no change vs. disruptive change vs. sporadic change vs. continuous change.

At a time when most school systems suffer from overload, fragmentation and multiple innovations colliding, Parsons provides a framework that is at once complex, accessible, and comprehensive. This book puts the process in the hands of teachers, principals, students, and community members. It takes into account the big picture of state level policies and concerns.

At a time of fragmentation it shows how inquiry can move from analysis toward synthesis and communication; and how this evaluative process can be deepened and built-in as a continuous process.

Evaluative Inquiry: Using Evaluation to Promote Student Success contains plenty of case examples, demonstrating how the ‘evaluative inquiry process’ works in real situations. Capacity to manage complexity is the resource needed in the 21st century. Parsons has helped set us on an irreversible path. Once groups of people practice what she advocates, once they seek the products of evaluative inquiry and the tangible student and teacher results, it will be impossible to turn back.

Grant Wiggins, President, Relearning By Design, Pennington, NJ

Talk is cheap these days when it comes to accountability. Everyone in education makes noises now about its importance and the need to move forward with an effective plan. But precious little has been done to turn "accountability of schools" into what the phrase really means: a manageable and credible system of on-going feedback. Beverly Parsons has done the remarkable, then: written a book chock full of helpful and wise advice on how to collect information and use it to improve schooling, without overwhelming us with typical approaches to data collection that are neither feasible nor useful.

More importantly, perhaps, her book makes clear that evaluative inquiry is not an onerous chore. Rather, we are regularly reminded here that collegial consideration of what works, what doesn’t, and why, is engaging activity, interesting and enjoyable professional work, if we are willing to overcome our fear and inertia to give it a try. In fact, accountability will only become the norm, not the exception, in schools when faculties are invited to become better collegial researchers into their own practice, i.e., invited to understand their own effects better (as opposed to being put under the gun by simplistic directives) as part of the job.

What is true for students about genuine learning is true for teachers, in other words: understandings are constructed, i.e., uncovered, not covered, through the asking and pursuing of important questions, in this case about results vs. intentions. We cannot reasonably expect students to develop a deeper understanding of possibilities and obligations unless teachers are helped to have the same on-going experience.

Parsons makes the case elegantly and practically that “professional development” must be recast as on-going inquiry into the effects of our teaching, in other words, through the use of such tools as the elegant five-stage process described herein. Her book offers a sorely-needed map for getting us to our destination in school reform: a place where we constantly promote and tap our collective pedagogical wisdom. She alerts us to a lost truth: the truly “effective” school is not some idealized static institution but a responsive and purposeful place.

Dennis Sparks, Executive Director, National Staff Development Council, Oxford, OH

Evaluative Inquiry: How Evaluation Can Promote Student Success empowers teachers and principals to take charge of school improvement and move toward a compelling vision of student learning. In clear, accessible language, Beverly Parsons demystifies evaluation and provides numerous practical examples of how schools can use the methods she describes to better understand the process of change and achieve their goals. Parson’s methods are deeply respectful of educators’ desire and capacity for improvement; it is an approach that engages their hearts and minds in creating schools in which youngsters and adults thrive.