The Ohio State Years

James Adams

Adams was a principal from the Cincinnati/Covington area. He entered Ohio State's doctoral program in educational administration and spent substantial time as a student intern in The Evaluation Center. Among other things, he wrote one of the first manuals for guiding school district evaluation. An incredibly bright and effective young administrator, Adams went on to become a distinguished superintendent in Gross Pointe, Michigan; Raleigh, North Carolina; Indianapolis, Indiana; and Fort Myers, Florida.

Gwyn "Bud" Angus

Angus entered Ohio State with a background in tool and die making. While finishing his Ph.D. in educational research, he worked at The Evaluation Center and provided excellent leadership to some of the center's projects. He exemplified the importance of doing goal-free evaluation to identify unintended but significant impacts. During his work at the center he learned and applied the CIPP evaluation model. After graduating from OSU, Angus applied his knowledge of evaluation with the emerging technology of computer assisted design to applications in research and development.

Paul Berge

Berge has been a pervasive, though not high profile, influence in the center since its establishment. In 1963, he was head of testing for the United States Armed Forces Institute and Dan Stufflebeam had just been hired to be director of test development for Ohio State. Berge was Stufflebeam's project officer for the government and led many contracts to the Test Development Center. After the center moved to WMU, Stufflebeam invited Berge to help with some of the center's work in testing. He continues to run the center's service program to help schools assess school climate.

Henry “Mitch” Brickell

Brickell led many evaluations for the U.S. Office of Education. As a graduate of Ohio State, he took a special interest in the success of The Evaluation Center in its early years. He became a frequent participant in center projects. Brickell promoted the use of the CIPP model, making it the centerpiece of the numerous evaluation workshops he conducted for boards of education and school administrators. As a representative of the American Educational Research Association, he served on the Joint Committee on Standards for Educational Evaluation. Brickell founded and is president of Policy Studies in Education, a not-for-profit educational research and development organization.

Michael Caldwell

Caldwell was appointed in 1965 by Stufflebeam as The Evaluation Center's assistant director in charge of administration. Caldwell had just completed his Ph.D. at Ohio State and was instrumental in organizing and coordinating the new center's administrative aspects. He authored an influential paper on input evaluation in which he provided illustrative criteria for assessing alternative educational innovations.

Roald Campbell

Prior to coming to Ohio State, Campbell was dean of the graduate program in education at the University of Chicago, where he also headed the Midwest Center for Educational Administration. He was president of AERA and was regarded as one of the best researchers in the field of educational administration. When he came to OSU, he declared that one of his objectives was to interact with The Evaluation Center and work with Stufflebeam on linking evaluation to administration and decision making. Campbell brought great dignity, maturity, national visibility and keen research insights to the center's work.

Nolan Estes

As a young graduate of Harvard, Estes was appointed head of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. Estes selected Stufflebeam to be his chief advisor on evaluation and gave him free reign to do whatever he could to help install evaluation at the federal level and to assist school districts across the country to do better evaluation. When Estes left his post in Washington to become superintendent of the Dallas Independent School District, he asked Stufflebeam to help him set up an evaluation system for the Dallas Public Schools. This began The Evaluation Center's long-term working relationship with Dallas schools.

William Gephart

Gephart's last day as a Ph.D. student at OSU was Stufflebeam's first day on the faculty. He became a strong supporter of The Evaluation Center and an active participant in its projects. As director of research at Phi Delta Kappa, he was instrumental in getting Stufflebeam appointed to chair the PDK national study committee on the state of the art in evaluation. PDK provided expense money for the project that resulted in the book, Educational Evaluation and Decision Making, which highlighted the developing CIPP evaluation model.

Robert Hammond

Hammond came to Ohio State from the University of Arizona, where he headed the Epic Evaluation Center, to be associate director of The Evaluation Center. Hammond was an incredibly influential and forceful advocate for and leader of teachers and other persons working in schools. He organized a consortium of small schools in Arizona that became a collaborative force for effective evaluation of federal projects. He was instrumental in linking the center to the realities of schools and school districts, especially small rural districts.

Edwin Hindsman

Hindsman was the director of the Southwest Regional Educational Laboratory in Austin, Texas. In 1966 he heard Stufflebeam deliver a presentation on the CIPP model. Subsequently, he invited Stufflebeam and his colleagues to install and test the CIPP model at the Southwest Lab, which was at that time one of the biggest, best-funded labs in the country. Stufflebeam accepted the invitation and he, along with Guba and Hammond, went to Austin on a monthly basis to set up the CIPP model. Hindsman was truly instrumental in the development of the model.

Howard Merriman

The Evaluation Center staffed its evaluation of Columbus' War on Poverty ESEA projects with teachers from the Columbus Public Schools. Merriman was one of the most outstanding teachers who came to the center under this approach. He obtained his Ph.D. in evaluation and then returned to Columbus to head the new department of evaluation and research. In that capacity, Merriman became president of the AERA Division H for school evaluators and moved up the line in the administration of the Columbus district. For seven years he served as superintendent of schools in Otisville, Michigan, where he is now a faculty member and cooperative education and technology coordinator for the school district.

Thomas Owens

As a Ph.D. student at Ohio State, Owens worked with Guba on the Encyclopedia Britannica (Bell and Howell project) to evaluate the effects of media and audiovisual equipment on the operations and effectiveness of four schools. He was the resident researcher in one of those schools for one year. This experience provided the platform for Guba's subsequent work in developing the naturalistic approach to evaluation. Out of that project, Owens came to The Evaluation Center, where he did research on item sampling and assisted with school-based evaluation projects. Owens has been a stellar staff member at the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory for many years.

Diane Reinhard

Reinhard was a distinguished Ph.D. student at Ohio State. She managed a major project in which the center helped the National Institute of Education design a system for evaluating labs and centers. That project used the advocacy team technique; two teams, headed by Michael Scriven and Stufflebeam, competed to produce alternative plans for the new evaluation system. Reinhard managed this effort and later wrote the definitive piece on how to set up and conduct advocacy team studies. After leaving Ohio State, she served with distinction in administrative posts at the University of Oregon and West Virginia University. Since 1990, she has served as president of Clarion University of Pennsylvania.

Darrell Root

Root was a doctoral student in educational administration at OSU. He was the project manager for a major national grant the center won for the development of a model training program in evaluation. Root coauthored one of the major texts in evaluation in training in business and industry. He has continued to be a stellar participant in many of the center's projects, bringing a great balance of insights into the administrative and political workings of school districts and the role that evaluation can play within such a setting.

Jack Sanders

Sanders received his Ph.D. from Indiana University in 1971. He began his postdoctoral professional career that year by joining the staff of The Evaluation Center at OSU. He provided exemplary leadership in helping the center design and conduct national training in its federally funded Model Training Program. When the center moved to WMU, Sanders accepted a position at the Appalachia Educational Laboratory and was later appointed executive director of the SouthEastern Regional Vision for Education. He has worked extensively with The Evaluation Center through the years and is one of the center's most valued collaborators.

Jack Taylor

A graduate of Ohio State’s Ph.D. program in school administration, Jack Taylor is the person who came up with the concept of the magnet school. He ran innovative federal projects and served in a number of superintendencies. He regularly built The Evaluation Center into his projects, so that the center assisted Taylor’s school districts in evaluating their projects and in training their own evaluation teams. He was a real champion of using evaluation to guide decision making and to provide a basis for community accountability. While superintendent of schools in Saginaw, Michigan, he served as chair of the National Advisory Panel for the Model Training Project at Ohio State University.

Jeanne Thissen

Thissen was the executive secretary to the chairman of the board of Columbia Gas of Ohio when she retired to raise her children. She came to work at The Evaluation Center as a Kelly Girl to assist with projects and stayed on to become the chief of support services and secretary. A distinguished member of the prestigious Professional Secretaries International group, she maintained tremendously high standards of quality for the center's products. Thissen worked at the center until it moved from Ohio State to Western Michigan University.

Jerry Walker

As The Evaluation Center began to field-test its ideas, it was fortunate to be invited to do so at the Southwest Regional Educational Laboratory, where Walker was on staff. Stufflebeam recruited him to come to OSU, where he received his Ph.D. Walker went on to serve as director of evaluation at the National Center for Vocational and Technical Education at Ohio State. He did an outstanding job of setting up the evaluation department within that research and development center and became a well-known evaluator of federal projects. Walker is a senior program evaluator conducting policy studies on educational issues for the Ohio General Assembly.

William Webster

Under Webster's leadership as director of the evaluation department for the Dallas Independent School District, the CIPP model has been the basic framework for evaluation work in Dallas. Webster has always had a large, distinguished staff and they have been highly influential on decision making by the district and in helping the district maintain accountability in communication with its outside constituents. Webster was an important member of the National Advisory Panel for the Consortium for Research on Educational Assessment and Teaching Effectiveness and continues to be an active, involved colleague with the center.

Gary Wegenke

As a doctoral student in educational administration at Ohio State, Gary Wegenke did a superb job of directing The Evaluation Center's national project to help the government improve evaluations in libraries throughout the U.S. He introduced conflict management as a normal and important part of the evaluation process. As a high school principal in Lansing, Michigan, he organized teachers to use the CIPP model as a basic problem-solving framework. Wegenke served as superintendent in Waterloo, Iowa, where he was named Man of the Year; and in Des Moines, Iowa, where he was named Iowa's Superintendent of the Year. He served as chair of the CREATE National Advisory Panel and did so with distinction.

Blaine Worthen

As a doctoral student in educational research and educational psychology at Ohio State University, Worthen directed the center's evaluation of the Xenia project, the first magnet school in the United States. He did outstanding work in his graduate program and in the center. With Sanders, he has coauthored two stellar books in the field, Educational Evaluation and Program Evaluation. Worthen has had a long and distinguished career in evaluation. He is the editor of the American Journal of Evaluation and recipient of AEA’s Myrdal Award for Outstanding Evaluation Practice.