Public schools--Florida--Evaluation

The purpose of this study was to determine through
statistical analysis of a survey instrument the extent to
which the 67 public school district superintendents in the
state of Florida perceive the major areas of educational
reform as falling into the same categories as does David
T. Kearns, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Xerox
Corporation, author of "An Education Recovery Plan for
America" in Winning the Brain Race: A Bold Plan to Make
Our Schools Competitive. Factor analysis was used to group the 36 specific
recommendations into their "natural" groupings as
perceived by the responding superintendents. This
technique revealed that the natural psychological
groupings in the eyes of the respondents were not the same
as Kearns asserted. The study shows that the reform
hierarchy, based on the perceptions of the
superintendents, is actually three layers deep with
Kearns' six categories being broken down into a bottom
tier of 14 discrete areas.

At least 2,000 years before the birth of Christ,
evaluation was used to measure the success of educational
endeavors. By the early 1900's, measurement technology
for determining human abilities was being developed. The
issue in educational evaluation was to "prove" what was
learned. New evaluation concepts surfaced in the 1970's.
The theoretical models developed sought to "improve" educational
services not to "prove" achievement of curriculum
objectives. The purpose of this study was to develop an evaluative
instrument that reflected the salient criteria of
the functioning of community education as one approach to
assuage the problem. The analysis of the data provides the following
conclusions:
1. There is a high relevancy of each criterion item
and summary statement to the evaluation of community education.
2. The 60 variable items show little redundancy.
3. The summary statements are not truly summary
statements that are predicted by the assumed subset of
items.
4. There are statistically different opinions among
the groups of respondents.
5. The four factors extracted from the data and
subjected to varimax rotation support the theoretical CIPP
Model.
The evidence of this research indicates the resulting
revised evaluative criteria have relevance and
substantial construct validity for evaluation of a community
school.