Journal of Personnel Evaluation in Education 8:401-405, 1994 9 1994 Kluwer Academic Publishers, Boston - Manufactured in the United States of America Governance, Evaluation and Education: As Mediation, Legitimacy, and Uniqueness JAMES GARVIN Louisiana State University, Department of Administration and Foundations Services, Baton Rouge, LA 70003 IRA E. BOGOTCH University of New Orleans, Department of Educational Leadership, College of Education, New Orleans, LA 70148 Governance as Mediation Governance is a bargaining process that seeks a common ground between collective and individual goals. During policy formation and policy implementation, all parties need to come to a participatory agreement. In education, governance as policy formation has not evolved to include school actors (notably principals, teachers, students, and parents) as full participants in a political process such as evaluation. Experience tell us that policy formation and evaluative practice is conducted over school actors, not in consultation with them. Without full governance participation, processes such as teacher evaluation have minimal bargaining and minimal common ground between those who pushed for it and the individuals affected by it. This neither represents a governance process nor an equitable evaluation model. The question is how does governance and evaluation move from a partial political status toward becoming a catalyst for participatory processes? How do incremental processes that characterize governance and policy (Lindblom, 1959) evolve into bold, revolutionary rhetoric and practice? How do the governance ideas of Dewey (1939) and Counts (1930/1971) make the future generational ideas of learning evaluation as expressed by Guba and Lincoln (1989) and Eisner (1991) a reality? Unless the political governance process is carried through to a fuller realiza- tion of professional norms, processes like evaluation cannot escape the punitive perception of accountability. The need to engage more participants more fully within the political dynamics of governance supersedes the development of authentic perfor- mance appraisals and partial solutions within individual schools. How can individuaI teachers or a single school within a system create a culture that seeks to better itself and look for equitable input from all parties on how growth and development should occur? How can a single school agree upon a new evaluation process as part of its