Toward reform of program evaluation

Abstract

Any good society with democratic prin-ciples of governance will evaluate its social experiments, seeking to improve condi-tions of life and to make its evaluation pro-cedures better. Cronbach et al. give a full and detailed view of what evaluation of social programs should mean in a demo-cratic social order, but identification of the underlying social philosophy requires a few careful inferences from the text. The "prag-matic liberalism " we infer from the text includes such concepts and principles as: (1) gradualism is better than revolution as a principle of order, given the fact of social change; (2) social change results from plur-