I am critical of the role of evaluation in education, because I am critical of the state's role in education, notably for its history of teaching virtues of citizenship instead of knowledge in the United States (Graham 2005), and for embodying ideological mores and carefully shaping national narrative and myth to maintain the status quo (Apple 1999). However, one area where I see a particular need for evaluation in education is for educational non-profit organizations that are welcomed by communities. I think that it is important to evaluate them to be sure that they are accountable to the community's needs, and not simply the needs of funders (which are often political entities).

For example, I work for a non-profit organization that offers experiential learning activities in a number of communities across Canada, including First Nations and Inuit communities. What is disturbing to me to witness from the administration side of things is how government partners give the organization money for, as an example, activities that teach youth about "their impact on the climate " through "the scientific method". The project was asking for hundreds of activities related to addressing climate change. There are multiple problems with this: 1) the communities took our projects for their lessons in leadership, healthy living, and sometimes entrepreneurship and media... they did not agree to recieve projets in their school that were so heavy on climate issues; 2) there are colonial assumptions in the phrase "learning about their affect on the climate" (Indigenous peoples are the first to suffer the consequences of climate change, despite them contributing the least to the problem), as well as "through the scientific method" (which dismisses the value of Traditional Ecological Knowledge learned through on the land learning activities). We need to evaluate educational non-profits beause they are addressing a need in education that a community recognizes (high drop out rates, notably among Indigneous populations) but through practices prioritized by more powerful funders (the Québecois government and major enterprises, like Suncor). Thus, it is essential that educational non-profits be evaluated on their accountability to community interests and measures of program effeciency, notably when these measures do not easily translate easily into hegemonic understandings (as is the case of Indigenous education... "success" and "learning" take on different meanings when one is trying to save one's cultural and community existence and future).

To analyze an example of an educational evaluation, I am using the 2018-2019 Impact Evaluation from Youth Fusion (https://fusionjeunesse.org/wp-fj/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Rapport-national-devaluation-dimpact-2018-2019.pdf ). One critique I would make of this report is globally that it reports on how well Youth Fusion has increased school perserverance among youth (the program being the context), versus how the program shows up in the lives of students (the lives of the students being the context). This reversal of the question is important for Indigenous contexts where the cultural and historical relationship with school is different from the rest of the Canadian population, and where the projects are full-time versus part-time. Also, since coordinators in the full-time projects in Indigenous communities conduct activities not just in school, but also in community centers, it is important to widen the scope of the assessment of the impact.

Also, on page 20, we can see that one way that school perserverance is measured is through the youth's relationship to authority. We can see that there is no data for Indigenous communities, but more importantly, we can reflect on how inappropriate this measure is for Indigenous communities, where there are contextual nuances in relationships to authority that MUST be considered. We can consider that adults in Indigenous contexts typically taught and teach youth through granting them autonomous exploration, and that adults found the explorations of youth to be sacred (Simpson 2014). We can also consider that teachers in northern communities are not always well trained, and have even been reportedly abusive to students (calling them stupid). Thus, the measure of "relationship to authority" does not seem appropriate, or it at least supports the point that in the case of Indigenous communities, measures of school perserverance might look different, and so an evaluation of the organization's impact might benefit by co-identifying the factors and measures of school motivation in students (adopting a democratic approach to evaluation). Globally, while the impact assessment does demonstrate some positive trends in data, it is unconvincing in describing the impact for Indigenous youth, notably for a lack of consideration of the fact that a different context would necessitate differents factors of analysis.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/1187282

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/oso/9780195172225.001.0001/isbn-9780195172225

https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/des/article/view/22170