Date: Thursday, August 14, 2025
Hello, AEA365 community! Liz DiLuzio here, Lead Curator of the blog. This week is Individuals Week, which means we take a break from our themed weeks and spotlight the Hot Tips, Cool Tricks, Rad Resources and Lessons Learned from any evaluator interested in sharing. Would you like to contribute to future individuals weeks? Email me at AEA365@eval.org with an idea or a draft and we will make it happen.
Hello, fellow evaluators! I’m Amota Ataneka, a doctoral researcher in quantitative evaluation methods, with a special interest in culturally responsive and equity-focused approaches in education. At the upcoming AEA2025 conference, I’ll be sharing a new evaluation framework I developed with collaborators in Australia, Dr. Tanya Doyle and Associate Professor Louisa Tomas Engel from James Cook University in Queensland. The framework is called Critical Data Envelopment Analysis (Critical DEA) and is designed to rethink how we assess school performance in ways that center equity, context, and community-defined success.
Traditional Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is often used to measure the efficiency of schools and other public institutions. But its focus on standardised inputs (like funding and staffing) and outputs (like test scores) can inadvertently penalise schools operating in high-need or underserved contexts. In my research, I found that schools serving remote or historically marginalised communities were often labelled as inefficient, even when they demonstrated significant strengths—like strong community engagement and culturally relevant teaching practices.
In response, I developed Critical DEA, a redesigned evaluation model that preserves the mathematical structure of DEA but incorporates what I call “red-dirt” indicators—locally meaningful measures such as student and staff voice, community engagement, school effort, and DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion). This model is grounded in principles from QuantCrit (Quantitative Critical Race Theory) and asset-based evaluation. Schools that were considered underperforming in traditional DEA were shown to be efficient in Critical DEA, better reflecting their contributions and strengths.
Critical DEA was informed by a Transformative Exploratory Sequential Design—I began with qualitative exploration of what matters most in evaluating schools from a local lens, and then built those insights into the quantitative model. This approach allowed me to co-construct indicators with the community in mind, rather than impose pre-defined metrics.
The Red Dirt Education framework (Guenther et al., 2016) and the Funds of Knowledge approach (Moll et al., 1992) played a vital role in shaping this framework. They offer tools for recognising community assets and reorienting evaluation toward the values and priorities of those being evaluated.
Critical DEA invites us to ask not just how efficient a school is—but according to whom, and by what values. As evaluators, we can expand our methods to better reflect justice, community voice, and contextual relevance. I look forward to connecting at AEA2025 to share more about how this framework works—and how it might be adapted to other contexts beyond education.
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