Process and Product Issues in the Evaluation of School Development Planning

In recent years, state funded, practitioner-led organizational improvement programmes have become increasingly common within the Irish education system. Central to this new model of public funding has been the demand for extensive evaluation of each programme, a demand that has raised a number of important theoretical and practical issues for programme evaluators. The issue addressed in this article is that of the difficulty of designing approaches to evaluation which can meet the cultural and organizational needs of schools, while at the same time providing evidence as to the effective or otherwise implementation of national educational policy. Initially, the article identifies and examines the tension that has arisen between programme funders’ demand for an evaluation process that produces measurable ‘outputs’ and the programme participants’ demand that the evaluation be sensitive to the specific cultural climate and needs of the organization under investigation. An approach to overcoming these conflicting demands arising out of a project where such problems became central to the process of evaluation is suggested. This approach grew out of the distinction drawn by Habermas (1972) between practical and emancipatory knowledge and was developed in light of Daly’s (1997) application of this concept to research, in her identification of first and second order stories or narratives.