Abstract
Mary Ann Scheirer was a pioneer of evaluation, a great colleague, and an important leader for the profession. Implementation science would not have the word “science” appended to it without Mary Ann’s groundbreaking contributions. And what an example she set for evaluators. Whether it was putting her own safety on the line for social justice, or insisting on more than a superficial look at programs, Mary Ann displayed courage and intellect. With her insistence on presenting findings in the face of pressure or indifference and her pragmatic purpose framed by important theoretical perspectives, Mary Ann was a true evaluation professional.
Biographical
Born Mary Ann Pittenger in Akron, OH, Mary Ann attended the College of Wooster (OH) earning a double major in sociology and political science and graduating Phi Beta Kappa. During college, she was a freedom rider in the segregated South. After college, Mary Ann joined the Peace Corps in only its second year of existence. While stationed in the Philippines, she met her husband Jim, also a Peace Corps volunteer, and they married the next year in Zamboanga City on the island of Mindanao. Mary Ann earned master’s degrees from University of Pittsburgh and SUNY and a PhD in sociology from Cornell University. She worked in Washington at the Department of Education, several private research firms, the Government Accountability Office, and the National Institutes of Health. She then struck out on her own as a private consultant, doing important projects for the Agency for International Development, including an assignment in South Africa with a “colored” university soon after the end of apartheid. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation recruited Mary Ann as a senior program officer in 2001. After several years, she returned to private consulting for local, national, and international projects.
Professional Contributions
Only a few can be highlighted. Mary Ann wrote influential works on evaluation of implementation, as seen in her 1981 book on the organizational context and also her 1983 literature review with Eva Rezmovic on measuring the degree of implementation. Readers may not appreciate that it was Mary Ann, along with a few others, who first brought attention to this issue in a formal way. Her interest in implementation spanned theory and practice: For example, she created program templates for evaluation, a tool that proved to be extremely useful, especially for local programs, over several decades of work.
Mary Ann’s recent work in the sustainability and spread of programs is described below by Jim Dearing, who is a leader in the study of diffusion of innovations. Mary Ann wrote cogently about how evaluation needed to be tailored to the life cycles of programs. She coauthored the original Guiding Principles for Evaluators, a practice-based contribution that has greatly helped to professionalize the evaluation field.
Thinking Globally and Acting Locally
Throughout her career, Mary Ann combined professional grounding and service to local programs. For years, she was a board member of the Consumer Health Foundation in the Washington, DC, area. The New Jersey Health Initiatives snapped her up as a consultant just as soon as she retired from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Her death saw a remarkable outpouring of respect and affection from the New Jersey programs, and she received their Culture of Health Champion award in 2017. Two comments from program directors are things we would all treasure, I think: …while her expertise was vast—she was always kind and patient in explaining it to non-experts like myself. Her work has directly benefited hundreds of children in New Brunswick, and many more across the state. I laugh as I think back on how Mary Ann would chastise me for not starting evaluation in the developmental stages of a program or a project. And when she did not agree, she was direct and candid, but eventually she understood us and we understood her.