Quieting Reform: Social Science and Social Action in an Urban Youth Program

Abstract

Quieting Reform is a complex, multilayered case study of a federally sponsored evaluation of a federally supported social reform effort, the Cities-in-Schools (CIS) program. In the book, Robert Stake tells a detailed, candid story which is part metaevaluation, part methodological advocacy, and part social inquiry. He writes an insightful, biased, and complicated account of a complex event: the CIS program evaluation. CIS was an urban education and social services program designed to identify and help the most alienated ghetto youths. Schools and human service agencies were to provide coordinated educational, health, and legal assistance through intensive personal attention and social group support. Academic progress focused on the improvement of reading skills, but the ultimate goal was for the youths .... to become educated and employed, legally respectable and humane (p.5). At the time of the evaluation, the CIS program was especially active in New York City, Atlanta, and Indianapolis, with other sites in Houston, Oakland, and Washington, D.C. The program had the public support of President and Mrs. Carter and had received over $10,000,000 in federal funds by May of 1982. Based on a web of personal and political motivations which Stake traces, the CIS program was evaluated from 1978 to 1981 by the American Institutes for Research (AIR), with Charles Murray as principal investigator. The evaluation was funded by the National Institute of Education (NIE) where Norman Gold, the NIE project monitor, acted as a strict overseer of the design and implementation of the evaluation study, insisting on the use of a approach. NIE further required that a Technical Review Panel, comprised of nationally known social scientists in evaluation, be established to monitor and advise the ongoing evaluation work. During this time, NIE also originated and funded other field studies of the stakeholder approach. Stake was initially a member of the AIR Technical Review Panel but resigned in order to write this investigative case study as a part of these other NIE field study efforts. In the book's five chapters, Stake describes, interprets, and evaluates, focusing on the origins and nature of the CIS program (Chapter 1), the AIR evaluation design and the Technical Review Panel (Chapter 2), the implementation, modification, and yield of the evaluation work (Chapter 3), how various individuals and groups perceived and judged the evaluation (Chapter 4), and the final impact of the evaluation on knowledge production, evaluation practice, and social reform (Chapter 5). From extensive interviews, discussions, observations, and document reviews, Stake attempts to portray the context, participants, events, and outcomes of both the CIS program and its evaluation. A basic problem in judging this volume is