“Evaluation gone Awry”: The teacher experience of the summative evaluation of a school reform initiative

Written as four scenes that span a five-year period, this article examines the summative evaluation of an organized school reform programme in the United States from the teacher perspective. The study provides fine-grained details of how the evaluation of the particular reform effort went “awry” in the view of some teachers who directly participated. The inclusion of two teacher narratives particularly demonstrates how practitioners' intents and desires became overtaken by evaluators' stances and theoretical frames. The international value of the research is that it discusses problems of summative evaluators entering longitudinal reform endeavors too late in the change process, difficulties relating to non-participant observation, issues associated with not negotiating final evaluation reports, and failure of evaluation studies to enter into human subjects agreements with teachers. Lastly, the lack of congruence between formative planning and evaluation and summative evaluation constitutes an overarching theme.