Abstract
Daniel Leroy Stufflebeam passed away on July 23, 2017, in Kalamazoo, MI. He retired from Western Michigan University (WMU) in 2007 as a Distinguished University Professor and McKee Professor of Education. Dan received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Iowa (1958) and his master’s degree (1962) and PhD (1964) from Purdue University. He served in the U.S. Army Reserve from 1960 to 1968. In 1963, he established The Evaluation Center at Ohio State University (OSU), which he moved to WMU in 1973, and directed until 2002. While at OSU, he developed 100 standardized achievement tests, including eight forms of the general educational development tests, and created the context, input, process, and product evaluation model. At WMU, he founded the Joint Committee on Standards for Educational Evaluation, chaired the committee through 1988, and led the development of standards for program and personnel evaluations (Joint Committee on Standards for Educational Evaluation, 1981, 1988). He established and directed the national Center for Research on Educational Accountability and Teacher Evaluation (CREATE) and designed the Interdisciplinary PhD in Evaluation program at WMU. For 8 years, he served on the U.S. Government Accountability Office Advisory Council on Government Auditing Standards.
Dan was a recipient of WMU’s Distinguished Faculty Scholar Award (1984), the American Evaluation Association’s Paul T. Lazarfeld Evaluation Theory Award (1985), the inaugural CREATE Jason Millman Award (1999), and was recently inducted into OSU’s College of Education and Human Ecology Hall of Fame. In 2002, he was designated a WMU Distinguished University Professor and was named a Distinguished Education Alumni at Purdue in 2015.
His publications include more than 25 books and monographs including one of the most popular issues of New Directions for Evaluation on evaluation models (Stufflebeam, 2001a) and, more recently, the second edition of Evaluation Theory, Models, & Applications (Stufflebeam & Coryn, 2014) and The CIPP Evaluation Model: How to Evaluate for Improvement and Accountability (Stufflebeam & Zhang, 2017). During his career, Dan published more than 100 journal articles, such as the provocative “The Metaevaluation Imperative” (Stufflebeam, 2001b), a topic that he frequently wrote about and strongly endorsed, and numerous book chapters. Famously, it was Dan who wrote that the most important purpose of evaluation is “not to prove, but to improve” (Stufflebeam et al., 1971, p. v). Likewise, he strongly believed that evaluation should inform decision-making. He frequently wrote about and emphasized evaluation utility and use, and it is due to his influence that the “utility” standards appear first in The Program Evaluation Standards. He was also one of the early advocates for and author of many widely used evaluation checklists, which he published on The Evaluation Center’s website and in many of his books.
Although much of his theoretical and applied work occurred in the context of educational evaluation in the United States, Dan also conducted evaluations for the United Nations, the World Bank, and many other governmental and nongovernmental organizations throughout the world (e.g., Columbia, India, the Philippines, and Spain). He lectured and provided evaluation technical assistance to more than 20 developing and developed countries. Domestically, his evaluation work was conducted for organizations that ranged from the U.S. Department of Education to some of the largest grant-making foundations in the world (e.g., MacArthur, Kellogg, and Alger). Although he had a vast catalog of experiences from which to draw, Dan most frequently spoke of and wrote about his evaluation of the Consuelo Foundation’s values-based self-help housing and community development program for low-income families in Hawaii and his work with the U.S. Marine Corps to evaluate and revise the standards used by the Corps for promotions, as exemplars of his work.
During his international travels, Dan was mugged in Madrid, kidnapped by Basque separatists, dodged Columbian drug cartels, and journeyed through jungles accompanied by armed guards. One of the most profound events in his life, however, occurred closer to home when he suffered a major injury when he was hit by a bus after leaving a Michigan State University football game in 1997, losing one of his legs.
In the pages that follow, several of Dan’s colleagues, coworkers, and friends—some of whom are former clients of his evaluation work—reflect on their personal and professional memories of him. We hope that these tributes provide valuable insight into the life and legacy of one of the field’s most esteemed pioneers, Dr. Daniel Leroy Stufflebeam.