I am proudly at the ripe age of 40, right when my reading interests seem to be shifting a bit more toward history. My wife gifted me a book called Coffeeland: One Man’s Dark Empire and the Making of Our Favorite Drug by Augustine Sedgewick. I love coffee and was fascinated, surprised, and disappointed to learn about its history. From there, I immediately dove into more history books: Nathaniel’s Nutmeg by Giles Milton, Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe, and the list goes on!
The more I learn about history, the more context I have for why things are the way they are.
Starting this week’s reading assignments, I was struck by the apropos timing and alignment of Chapter 2 of Program Evaluation by Fitzpatrick et al with two other pieces of content I have recently consumed outside of class, just out of personal interest. I am currently reading Jill Lepore’s These Truths, and I recently listened to an episode of NPR’s Throughline about the origins of SAT testing.
Because of the information learned in the two books and podcast, I appreciate the connections I am able to make between education and government and the changes in education, research, and evaluation:
- Lepore’s discussion of Harvard’s founding by Puritans in 1636 made me think of the school in a different way when Throughline mentioned Harvard as the first adopter of the SAT centuries later. (Lepore, 2026; Rund & Arablouei, 2026).
- Programs developed during the Great Depression created a greater need for social research and evaluation, while the world wars expanded research for military purposes (Fitzpatrick et al., 2023).
- There are interesting similarities between the role of military aptitude testing in the growth of standardized testing in education and the role of military personnel support in the growth of program evaluation (Fitzpatrick et al., 2023, p. 27; Rund & Arablouei, 2026).
These are just a few examples of what I find so fascinating about history. Putting pieces of information together helps me see how education, research, and evaluation connect such different periods in American history.
These observations made me wonder about the origin story behind and evolution of the work that I do professionally. As a contractor for the United States Coast Guard, I evaluate training courses for merchant mariners. I work with regulations, policies, guidelines, and approval processes every day, but I do not know how or why they exist in their current form. I do know that the merchant marine workforce expanded significantly during World War II, so I am sure that period influenced how the government approached mariner training, but how? What led to the requirements that I now evaluate? Was it war, a maritime casualty, regulatory failure, lobbying, or something else?
It seems important to understand the history of things in order to understand their current state and envision how they might improve. This week confirmed that most practices and processes do not just appear. They develop and evolve in response to various circumstances. Throughout this course, and throughout my work, I want to be more aware of not only what I am evaluating and whether it meets established requirements, but also why those requirements exist in the first place.
References
Fitzpatrick, J. L., Sanders, J. R., & Worthen, B. R. (2023). Program evaluation: Alternative approaches and practical guidelines (5th ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson Education.
Lepore, J. (2026). These truths: A history of the United States (Jubilee ed.). W. W. Norton & Company.
Rund Abdelfatah, R., & Arablouei, R. (Hosts). (2026, September 1). The SAT’s 100 year grip on higher ed [Audio podcast episode]. In Throughline. NPR.