Stafford Hood, Sheila M. Miller Professor Emeritus in Curriculum & Instruction and founding director of the Center for Culturally Responsive Evaluation and Assessment (CREA), passed away in January 2023, but his vision, his work, and his legacy live on.

Hood earned a bachelor’s degree in political science and master’s degree in counseling and guidance, both from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, and in 1984 he earned his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. While pursuing his doctoral studies at Illinois, then Professor Mildred Griggs introduced him to a fellow graduate student, Denice Ward Hood, who would later become his wife and collaborator. Ward Hood is a professor in the College’s Education Policy, Organization and Leadership Department.

He started his academic career at Northern Illinois University in 1988 and moved on to Arizona State University in 1991. In 2008, he returned to the U. of I., where he was Sheila M. Miller Professor of Education in Curriculum & Instruction as well as department head of C&I and, later, associate dean for research and research education for the College. Further, he served as a program evaluation assessment consultant to the federal government, state governments, local school districts, universities, and private foundations, both domestic and international.

In 2011, Hood became the founding director of CREA, the Center for Culturally Responsive Evaluation and Assessment, housed in the College of Education.

But CREA wasn’t something that just appeared on the scene in 2011. It was his life’s work, which he had been diligently building and shaping for decades before it was officially birthed in the College under his direction and through his unswerving vision.

For all that Stafford Hood achieved in a memorable and remarkable career, CREA is his signature achievement. It is his legacy.

In late spring 2023, friends and colleagues[1] of Hood gathered over Zoom for an interview to memorialize the man who had greatly impacted not only their lives, but also the lives of educators, researchers, policymakers, and students across the globe.

Many sentiments were shared, but the overriding one was that while Stafford Hood may be gone, his legacy and influence live on through CREA and his academic works.

[1] Friends and colleagues who attended the two Zoom interviews included: James Anderson, Henry Frierson, Melvin Hall, Rodney Hopson, Karen Kirkhart, Sharon Nelson Barber, Joe O’Hara, Anthony Sullers, Jr., and Kathy Tibbetts. 

Memories

Passionate and Fun-loving

“I remember his first visit to Dublin, nearly twenty years ago,” says Joe O’Hara, professor of education at Dublin City University and director of CREA Dublin. “The first night, we had this big formal dinner where there was me, Stafford, the president of theIrish Evaluation Network, senior people from the Department of Education, and he gave a tour de force. He just won us over with his ideas, and he was passionately making the case for cultural responsivity in education systems and in evaluation systems. It was extraordinary. He carried people along with him. As we walked outside, I turned to him and said, ‘You know, quite often after a meal like that, we go out and have a beer.’ And his eyes lit up and he said, ‘Oh yes!’ And we spent the rest of the night in an old pub in Dublin, drinking Guinness and whiskey and putting the world to right. We were making those friendships and connections that carried us nearly twenty years through. So, he had these two sides: There was this extraordinary, serious, passionate and engaged, innovative thinker side, and then there was this friendly, fun, new friend and network creator side, and it was all within about a three-hour period. It was extraordinary.”

Powerful Speaker

Karen Kirkhart, professor emerita from Syracuse University’s School of Social Work, spoke next.

“I had the privilege of introducing Stafford last October when he was honored with the 2022 Jason Millman Memorial Award at the annual conference of the Consortium for Research on Educational Assessment + Teaching Effectiveness (CREATE). He just shined,” she says. “It was the best I’d ever heard him, and I’ve heard a lot. He was on fire and spoke so powerfully about race, culture, and justice in evaluation and assessment. He just waxed poetic.”

Kirkhart also recalls doing CREA and CREA-partnered American Evaluation Association (AEA) workshops with Rodney Hopson, professor of Educational Psychology in the College of Education at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. “One of my favorite memories of Stafford is how he would sit in the back of a room at a workshop and just listen, and when he couldn’t stand it anymore, he’d have to jump in and engage,” she laughs. “I’ll certainly miss seeing him there in the back of the room.”

Tough and Encouraging

Anthony Sullers was a graduate student of Hood’s and is a lecturer in the Educational Psychology Department at Illinois.

“I did my first evaluation project with him in the classroom, and now it’s evolved to where I am serving as a program evaluator for CREA,” he says.

Hood, he says, knew how to get the most out of you. “I remember thinking I was doing everything wrong until I got to the finish line and I could see how he was preparing me for the final work,” Sullers recalls. He pauses, then says, “I met with him on the Wednesday before his passing, and he was ripping me up about a budget issue, saying he needed more details, but at the end, he congratulated me for a community service award I won the week before. He had the ability to get business done but to also recognize the little things.”

Lifting Others Up

“Stafford had this ability even when he was being his most professional self to bring that humanity right around and create the warmest kind of environment,” says Melvin Hall, professor emeritus of educational psychology at Northern Arizona University.

Hopson recalls his relationship with Hood first forming in the late ‘90s. “I was one of a few that got near his wings. In doing so, I was also able to see how he was exemplifying friendship as essential to the soul,” says Hopson. “His mantra was ‘Lift as we climb.’ He exemplified an element of this African American adage that says, ’As we move forward, we’ll bring others with us.’”

CREA

“I’ve known Stafford for over forty years,” says Hall. “Across all those years, the Center was the pinnacle of his dreams. I was doubtful about it, but he made a believer out of me. Out of all the things I’ve known him to accomplish, this took up more time and space and energy than anything else.”

“It was everything to him,” Kirkhart chimes in. “It was his vision. It was his heart, professionally speaking.”

CREA's Focus

CREA brings together an amalgam of researchers and research partners from across the College, the university, the nation, and the world.  As stated on CREA’s website, CREA’s mission is to generate evidence for policymaking that is not only methodologically but also culturally and contextually defensible. CREA is “an international community of scholars/practitioners that exists to promote a culturally responsive stance in all forms of systematic inquiry including evaluation, assessment, policy analysis, applied research, and action research. In this work, CREA recognizes issues of power, privilege, and intersectionality. Using its base at the University of Illinois, the Center provides a resource for organizations and individuals seeking to better understand and apply cultural responsiveness. CREA seeks to produce a body of informed practitioners, published scholarship, professional development opportunities, technical assistance resources, and advocacy, advancing cultural responsiveness across inquiry platforms and settings.”

Championing Equity

“Stafford and I were advisors on a program for the American Indian Higher Education Consortium[1], which was developing a framework for indigenous evaluation,” says Sharon Nelson-Barber, director of Culture and Language in STEM Education at WestEd, a research development and service agency in San Francisco. “I was struck by Stafford’s dedication to ensuring that Indigenous perspectives are noted, recognized and infused and that all the work that we do should not be erased from the conversation.”

This was before CREA was officially formed, she adds, “but it was certainly part of everyday conversations, so it was wonderful to see how this actually unfolded and to be a part of his early thinking about CREA.”

Leader and Advocate

“When I met Stafford around 2000 or so, he was accompanied by a flock of students,” says Kathy Tibbetts, managing director of Research, Evaluation, and Data Science for Liliʻuokalani Trust, which provides healing programs and services for Hawaiian children to reach their greatest potential. “He was like a goose with a gaggle of students trailing him around. He got them the resources they needed to participate in the professional conferences, and he actively mentored them through the entire experience. He was such a strong advocate for his students. He supported them in creating the structures and cognitive frameworks they needed to hang stuff on and learn more deeply from.”

Says Hall, “Stafford’s vision of himself as an educator didn’t end with formal course instruction. One of the most iconic pictures I have of Stafford is when he was visiting Joe in Ireland. Stafford was sitting in a classroom, surrounded by students, helping them reflect on the new immigration that was taking place in Ireland. He was there to help them untangle their thoughts.”

O’Hara says, “Stafford was an educator in the broadest sense, a communicator who could go into any setting and enthuse people and bring them to an understanding of the work he was doing in a way that stretched them and challenged them.”

Mentor and "Fine Human Being"

“Stafford was a respectful mentor and a thoughtful listener,” says Kirkhart. “He had a strong sense of mentorship responsibility.”

“He was a devoted academic, no question,” Nelson-Barber says. “But he was a fine human being. That’s the first thing that comes to mind for him.”

Henry (Hank) Frierson, retired now but formerly associate vice president and dean of the Graduate School at the University of Florida, acted as Hood’s mentor “after I tore down one of his presentations at an AERA [American Educational Research Association] meeting almost thirty years ago,” he jokes. “We became really good friends. He was a joy, loved by many, just a great, wonderful, giving person.”

"Lived Life Large"

Hood also liked his food and drink. Many memories revolved around those topics.

“A good drink, a good meal, good friends, good jazz,” says Tibbetts. “He was a great storyteller.”

“He lived life large,” Hall says. “Most of us knew better than to try to keep up with him all night.”

“I’m realizing that just about every encounter I had with Stafford ended up with food somehow,” Nelson-Barber laughs. She recalls one morning in Honolulu where Stafford and her husband started out with “a traditional Hawaiian breakfast—steak, gravy, rice, eggs. Then they went two or three doors down and got Portuguese fried dough. Then they drove to the north shore, to Giovani’s shrimp truck, where they ate all this garlic shrimp! And I’m thinking, ‘How in the world?’!”

Enduring Vision and Creator of Community

Of course, it wasn’t all about the food and drink and merriment. The more serious side, which O’Hara alluded to earlier, is what fueled Hood’s achievements and created that gaggle of followers—and a growing cohort of like-minded colleagues—that will ensure that his vision will come to ever greater fruition.

“Creating networks of friends and connecting people across the globe who had shared values, that was extremely important to him,” O’Hara says. “He was at the center of a network of people.”

That network, Anderson points out, extends far beyond the continental U.S., to places like Ireland, Hawaii, New Zealand, China, and Japan, to name a few.

“He had the ability to rally people, to keep their support, to create a family-like atmosphere,” Anderson says. “He would always refer to CREA as the ‘CREA family.’ The family is international, supporting and reinforcing each other around the idea of culturally responsive evaluation and assessment.”

Righteous Anger

Much of Hood’s, and CREA’s, work was fueled by righteous anger. In 2001, Hood wrote a signature article for the AEA journal New Directions for Evaluation titled “Nobody knows my name: In praise of African American evaluators who were responsive.” In it, Hood examined the essential place of race and culture in the meanings of responsive evaluation, giving a historical accounting of the “significant but inexplicably unknown contributions of early African American evaluators” (Hood, 2001, p. 31).

“There was a period of about seven to ten years, starting in the mid-2000s, where it seemed like at the beginning of every year, Hood and I would contact each other and say, ‘Who do we need to piss off this year? Who do we need to respond to?,’ Hopson recalls. “We carried that level of pissed-off-ness to spark a set of publications and productions in the field. ‘Nobody knows my name’ is one example of that.”

That sense of urgency regarding equity in education wasn’t restricted to issues and events in the U.S.

“From a European perspective, in a different type of context when we were thinking about many of the same issues but coming at them from a different geographical and historical and political context, Stafford’s theoretical work gave a lens and a framework to make a case that we needed to think about evaluation and questions of quality and equity in education in a different way and also gave us a language in which to talk to people, to funders, to school systems, to curriculum developers, to evaluation initiators, he gave that language to allow us to make the case,” O’Hara says. “And that was a theoretically rich language, but it also emerged from a really practical understanding of what education systems needed. That has been very influential within Ireland and across Europe. That theoretical frame brought us to new places that we wouldn’t have thought of without him.”

The Legacy

Perseverance

Referring to Hood’s persistence in building the wings that eventually gave flight to CREA, Anderson says, “Many people start out with a good idea, but Stafford had the perseverance to keep it going and the focus to stay with it. He fought the long fight, and his College benefited, his colleagues benefited, his students benefited, we all benefited from his persistence, his focus, his ability to organize.”

Teacher and Motivator

“He did a great job of teaching us as students that culture does matter, regardless of the spaces that push against that notion,” says Sullers. “He taught us that we didn’t have to be scared to talk about the cultures from whence we came, that we could be proud of where we came from. It helped set the precedent that the College understands that culture is as important as every other factor that we’re looking at.”

Culturally Responsive Evaluation

“Stafford’s legacy is culturally responsive evaluation,” Hall says. “But if you think about when he first articulated the term, it was tantamount to walking into the mouth of the lion and saying, ‘I want to advocate for the lambs,’ because he first used that term at the going-away celebration of Bob Stake, the [U of I] professor who created the term ‘responsive evaluation.’”

Hopson chuckles at that. “I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall at that gathering,” he says, “because I imagine Stafford as one of a few senior colleagues of color, and coming from ASU as he was then, and speaking on responsive evaluation ‘Amistad style,’ in reference to the battles that enslaved Africans had to undertake to preserve their humanity. Just imagine responsive evaluation ‘Amistad style.’ Those are the kinds of venues that Hood reveled in.”

The Amistad refers to the ship that transported Black slaves off the coast of Cuba in 1839; the slaves revolted and took over the ship, but the two remaining Spanish navigators sailed them into US waters, where they were captured and then caught up in a legal battle before finally gaining their freedom.

Creator of Communities

“He created a community of scholars,” Kirkhart says. “That’s a huge legacy. Every time I think I’m too busy to do something, I think, ’What would Stafford do?’ He’d step up every time.”

“Stafford’s legacy is he moved the whole field to understand the importance of culturally responsive evaluation,” Anderson says. “And the legacy of collegiality. He brought people together in a way that was both scholarly and friendly at the same time.”

Pillar of the College

A memorial was held for Hood at the American Educational Research Association conference in Chicago last April. CREA, at the biennial conference in Chicago (3-6 October), and the College of Education are also planning to hold separate memorials for Hood this fall.  Of the AERA event, Hopson says, “It was a good thing that his music was playing in the background. We played his favorite music, and there was commentary from a panel, a select group of his peers and colleagues together, all in a packed room of friends and loved ones.” The panel included Gloria Ladson-Billings, professor emerita at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and former AERA President; Joe O'Hara, director of CREA Dublin; Larry Parker, professor at the University of Utah and a former classmate; former College of Education Dean James Anderson; and current Dean Chrystalla Mouza.

Hopson affirms that Hood built a lasting legacy. “Stafford Hood represented a pillar of the College,” he says. “He is on the ‘Mount Rushmore of Evaluation’ at Illinois.

“I rarely go a day without thinking about him.”