Internal or External Evaluation? When to Say, “Both, Please!”

Education leaders must use data and evidence to make good decisions. No one disputes this. But where does this data and evidence come from, and how can data become actionable information that leaders can use in the real world?

If you’re an education leader in a state, district, or non-profit, you’ve probably considered investing in evaluation to get the data you need. If so, your next question is likely “Should this evaluation be an internal responsibility of my current staff, or should we contract with an external organization?”

As a former non-profit staff member and teacher, with a few decades of experience as an external evaluator, I want leaders to consider the many benefits that combining external and internal evaluation offers.

There are some instances in which an external evaluator is definitely needed. For example:

• A funder (such as the federal government, the state legislature, or a foundation) has mandated the use of an external evaluator (e.g., Comprehensive State Literacy Development grants, Education Innovation Research grants, or State Personnel Development Grants).
• The evaluation is high stakes and only an external evaluator will have the credibility needed to conduct the evaluation and generate results in which all parties will have confidence.

And in some instances, an internal evaluation is definitely needed, such as when:

• Current policy (such as a legislative regulation or a department mandate) requires your organization to conduct the evaluation internally (e.g., annual district report cards provided by State Education Agencies or annual reports required by non-profit boards).
• A current employee or team conducts the evaluation on a regular schedule and successfully provides all the data and evidence needed for decision making and ongoing continuous improvement.

Despite these extremes, the either/or decision between external and internal evaluation is often a false dichotomy. Sometimes the best choice lies between the two—a hybrid external/internal team (Figure 1). Hybrid evaluation can bring the deep knowledge of internal staff to inform and ground the broad perspective and innovative ideas brought by an external team.

For example, using a hybrid team, the Marzano Research external evaluation team brought fresh perspective to our project with Working in the Schools (WITS), a non-profit in Chicago. We developed new observation protocols and selected a new measure of student literacy, while the WITS internal team ensured that data collection was practical and tailored to the capacity and schedule of their volunteer literacy mentors. As a result, in future years, internal WITS staff can continue to implement key elements of the evaluation annually.

Unless you have a compelling reason to use only internal or only external evaluation, a hybrid team can bring the best of both worlds. As a provider of external evaluation, I always appreciate the opportunity to work with internal evaluation staff. I believe hybrid evaluations are more powerful and more likely to result in sustainable change, as I’ve described.

Hybrid evaluations are also more complex, but they don’t have to be messy or confusing. Here’s my list of guardrails for hybrid evaluations:

• Clarify who will be the most responsible person and main contact for the internal team and for the external team.
• Create a regular meeting schedule and notetaking protocol for the hybrid team.
• Ask both teams to review the evaluation plan based on the program logic model (or theory of change or framework) and create a timeline of evaluation tasks.
• Help the two teams decide which will lead each part of the evaluation, thinking not only about team capacity/skill but also about whether insider or outsider knowledge is most important and credible.
• Specify what new or revised instruments the external team will create or adapt, as well as how the internal team will use these new instruments in the future.
• Define the goals for ongoing evaluation beyond this project (for example, you might want an annual stakeholder survey to continue but you may not need in-depth interviews in future years).

Leaders should discuss this list with their evaluation teams at the beginning of their projects to help ensure a successful evaluation. Most teams will be able to solidify their plans based on this list, and some teams will need an organizational leader to weigh in on some decisions.

I hope that more leaders consider hybrid evaluation when possible. For more information about this approach or to discussion the evaluation support that Marzano Research offers, please reach out to me.