LAUSR

The University of Chicago Press new titles flier had an unlikely glow as it lay on my desk, which turned out to be a fortuitous play on my attention as the June sun pouring through my office window highlighted the already high-voltage yellow of Brighouse, Ladd, Loeb, and Swift’s new book. As an evaluator and evaluation educator, even more eye-catching was the book’s promising and timely title: Educational Goods: Values, Evidence, and Decision-Making. Three sentences into the flier’s description, I knew this was a book I should read. Now having read it, I am convinced that this is a book that every evaluator should read. In the first part of this review, I lay out the purpose of Educational Goods and provide brief chapter summaries. I then offer a few thoughts about particular aspects of Educational Goods that I consider to be the most helpful to evaluators in general, to specific audiences within the evaluation community, and to the general public. In the final section, I highlight literature that Brighouse et al. omitted from the book and discuss why these omissions are problematic.