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We are delighted to announce that the 2024 Peter H. Rossi Award for Contributions to the Theory or Practice of Program Evaluation has been given to two distinguished individuals: Eugene Bardach and Thomas S. Dee. Both will give talks about their work at the upcoming Annual Meeting of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM) on Thursday, November 21st at 1:45 PM.

This year, the Rossi Award Selection Committee received multiple worthy nominations of individuals whose contributions differed in ways that made it challenging for the committee to rank order the top two candidates. One of the top candidates has made long-lasting contributions to the teaching and practice of evaluation over many years, including advancing methods of inquiry, analysis, and communication. He also has authored a widely used textbook and many methods-focused articles.

The other top candidate has had a successful academic career teaching economics and evaluation methods and conducting program evaluations and secondary data analyses that are published in quality academic journals. More recently, he has become active conducting timely, rigorous program and policy evaluations (using the full range of methods promoted by Rossi and the other top candidate for this year's award) tailored to specific policy concerns and audiences and proactively working with policy makers and practitioners to apply findings from those analyses to address priority policy concerns. While this nominee's work is precisely the type of evaluation Rossi envisioned and devoted his career to enabling, it took the creativity and products of scholars/researchers like the other top candidate for this awardee to advance Rossi's work to this richer and more useful research.

After considerable discussion, this year's Selection Committee recommended giving Rossi Awards to both of these two candidates. The award to Eugene Bardach recognizes his major contributions moving the field of program and policy evaluation to the current state, which incorporates the vast majority of the advances in design, implementation, and use of evidence that Rossi envisioned and skillfully promoted. And the award to Thomas Dee recognizes his exceptional application of those principles and tools to conduct well-designed and implemented, rigorous evaluations that yield findings useful to policy makers and practitioners.

In future years, we anticipate returning to a single award that further prioritizes major contributions to improve the usefulness and application of rigorous evidence to support the design and implementation of social programs and policies.

- The Selection Committee

Eugene Bardach is an Emeritus Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy, University of California, Berkeley, which he helped to found in 1970 and where he later taught for almost fifty years. He was also an influential contributor to APPAM in its earliest years and served as President in 1984-1985. He also served as a co-editor of the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management and as editor of the Insights section, eventually transformed into the section on Professional Practice.

Bardach has written five books: on legislative coalition-building, policy and program implementation, social regulation, interagency collaboration, and a quasi-systematic approach to doing policy analysis.

As a teacher, he specialized in coaching field work projects by small groups in a required core course and, for second-year students, a seminar section of the capstone project course. Over several years, he created a forty-page handout to students with tips about how to proceed with their project work. It was subsequently adapted for executive-level education as well, and for undergraduates. First circulated nationwide in samizdat form, it was late published (in considerably beefed-up form) as The Eightfold Path to More Effective Problem Solving. The rest, as they say, is history. Translated into six languages, it is one of the most frequently assigned texts in policy analysis. It is now in an extended seventh edition, coauthored with Eric M. Patashnik, and titled A Practical Guide for Policy Analysis: The Eightfold Path to More Effective Problem Solving.

Thomas S. Dee is the Barnett Family Professor at Stanford University's Graduate School of Education, and the Faculty Director of the John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities. Dee is also a Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, a Senior Fellow (Joint) at the Hoover Institution, and a Research Associate with the programs on education, children, and health at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Dee's research focuses largely on the use of data and quantitative methods to inform contemporary public-policy debates, particularly in education. Recent examples include studies of the impact of innovative school curricula and pedagogy and evaluations of alternative first-responder programs for emergency calls involving behavioral-health crises.

In 2015 and again in 2019, APPAM awarded his collaborative research the Raymond Vernon Memorial Award. He also received the 2024 Outstanding Public Communication of Education Research Award from the American Educational Research Association. He currently serves on the editorial boards of the American Educational Research Journal, the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management (JPAM), and Education Finance and Policy, and as an Associate Editor of Economic Inquiry.

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