Forum The Politics of Verifying Trustworthiness in Evaluation Auditing

Essays, opinions, and professional judgments are welcome in this section of EP. Forum articles speak to and about the philosophical and ethical dilemmas of our profession. Authors are invited to express their views to encourage constructive dialogue centered on issues. To keep the dialogue substantive, other articles motivated by previous Forum presentations should have independent titles and themes. Items labeled "Comments on... " and "Rejoinder to... " will not be published in Forum — such responses, and those not of article length or nature, are welcome and encouraged in the Letters section of EP. Standard citations and reference lists will acknowledge and identify earlier contributions and viewpoints. Manuscripts should not exceed 10 double-spaced typewritten pages in length. An evaluation audit is a method for checking the quality of an evaluation. It requires an inspection of evaluator methods and procedures followed in reaching evaluative conclusions. As Elliot Eisner (1988) recently reminded us, arguments about method are always, in part, political in nature. This article explores some of the salient political aspects of the process of verifying the trustworthiness of an evaluation through an evaluation audit. The notion of an evaluation audit is first briefly defined. The politics surrounding the use of this tool and the implementation of the audit process are then explored at several levels, including the levels of requiring or requesting an evaluation audit itself, determining criteria of quality to be used as audit standards, and verifying the auditee’s (evaluator’s) claims