Abstract
I live near Kalamazoo, MI. I have lived here for over 40 years. Why would a young man who was born and bred in central Pennsylvania settle in southwest Michigan? My answer is Dan Stufflebeam.
When I was working on my master’s degree in educational research in 1967–1968, I learned that our federal government had placed a new emphasis on requiring evaluations of federally funded innovations in public school programs. I was taught that experimental and quasi-experimental designs, as described by Campbell and Stanley (1963), were the best ways to approach these evaluations. And so, I diligently took on an assignment of evaluating several federally funded projects in local schools as a part of my graduate assistantship. I enjoyed this applied learning experience, as we turned out one research report after another. As a student, this work gave me a great sense of accomplishment and pride. It wasn’t until near the end of my degree program that a professor and mentor suggested to me that there might be other ways to approach evaluating educational programs beginning to emerge in the literature, and he assigned me to do a literature review of these new approaches. What an eye-opener that was. Someone named Daniel Stufflebeam had proposed using a context, input, process, product (CIPP) model for evaluation, and there were other evaluation approaches being proposed too. These creative authors were labeled as evaluation pioneers.
Dan Stufflebeam was a pioneer whose path crossed with mine over the many years that have gone by since my early revelations as a graduate student. I listened to his lectures at the American Educational Research Association annual meetings. He came to the University of Colorado, where I was working on my PhD in research and evaluation methodology, to lecture. One of his graduate students came to Colorado as an assistant professor while I was there and brought with him a connection to Dan that has lasted throughout my professional life. Dan invited me to the Ohio State University Evaluation Center on several occasions while I was on the faculty at Indiana University. In 1975, I joined him as associate director of the Evaluation Center at Western Michigan University (WMU), which he founded in 1973. I then worked with and learned from Dan through my retirement from WMU in 2001 and beyond, until his untimely passing in July, 2017.
Beginning in 1975, we worked closely on many projects together and talked about the projects that we had taken on individually. The WMU Evaluation Center was a laboratory where faculty and students worked side by side on complex, often perplexing, real-world evaluation issues. Dan made a commitment to give our doctoral students increasing levels of responsibility for planning and managing projects, as they moved through their degree programs. This was a very effective way of teaching. We generated evaluation theory, methods, training materials and programs, and reports and books as we worked. To say that the Evaluation Center was a productive environment for those who worked there would be an understatement. This environment reflected the persona of Dan Stufflebeam. He lived to contribute professionally to the field of evaluation, and yet he also lived to nurture those around him, including his family, friends, colleagues, and students.
Professionally, Dan was tireless in the evaluation projects that he took on. He worked with teachers, parents, and administrators in school districts throughout the United States; with policy makers and program managers in state and federal government agencies; with leadership and staff of national professional associations; with presidents, boards, and staff of foundations and nonprofits; with officers and managers of large and small business corporations; and with administrators, professors, and students of universities throughout the world. Too many to list, but for all it was to their benefit that they spent time with Dan Stufflebeam. From the beginnings in the 1960s when Dan was working with the U.S. Department of Education and the Columbus, Ohio Public Schools and conceptualizing the CIPP evaluation model to this past year when he published The CIPP Evaluation Model: How to Evaluate for Improvement and Accountability (Stufflebeam & Zhang, 2017), he influenced the theory and practice of evaluation across all sectors of society and across geopolitical boundaries. Consistency in his evaluation worldview during his professional life was readily evident.
Personally, Dan also influenced many people during his lifetime. His wife, Carolyn, said to me, “He was a good husband.” In my mind, this is the highest compliment a spouse could make after 58 years of marriage. Their children, Kevin, Tracy, and Joe, are all very successful in their own chosen careers. Dan was godfather to our firstborn daughter. He provided moral support and guidance to his students and challenged them when needed. Many of his early students remained lifelong friends and colleagues of Dan. He and I had weekly breakfasts and golf outings after we both retired. We talked about many things, some professional and many not. Dan and Carolyn met with my wife and me for many lunches, dinners, and gatherings during our retirement years. We visited each other during our winters in Florida. In short, we became closer personal friends as time went on. I suspect that the human influences that Dan had on others were based in part from his doctoral work in counseling psychology and in part from his character that developed during his Iowa upbringing.
The legacies that Dan has left behind are countless. Some that are significant to me include the human legacies of his family, friends, colleagues, students, and benefactors from his professional work in evaluation. Professionally, he gave us his publications, the Evaluation Center as a model laboratory for higher education, the CIPP evaluation model, the Joint Committee on Standards for Educational Evaluation, Center for Research on Educational Accountability and Teacher Evaluation (CREATE), and the design of an interdisciplinary PhD program in evaluation.
Daniel Stufflebeam was a productive pioneer in his chosen profession of evaluation. His insights, intelligence, energy, and achievement-oriented motivation led to many contributions that will continue to guide the practice of evaluation and lead to the improvement and accountability of programs, projects, policies, products, and other evaluands. We will greatly miss his leadership and friendship that many of us have valued over the past 50 plus years.