Bill Bickel, emeritus professor with 40 years as professor of Administrative Policy Studies in the School of Education and as senior scientist at the Learning Research and Development Center (LRDC), died on May 19, 2024.
At the LRDC, Bickel was a leading member of the Evaluation for Learning Project (EFL), which he established and helped to build, and which promotes the use of evaluations to support improved decision-making by educational leaders, practitioners and policymakers. His research interests included evaluation methodology, evaluation use in organizational and policy contexts and evaluation in urban education reform policy and program implementation.
Through the years, he documented the implementation and effects of programs and practices designed to improve school and teacher effectiveness through school restructuring and professional development. He wrote extensively on whether “effective schools” initiatives improved educational practice.
He and colleague William Cooley published “Decision-oriented Educational Research” based on a seven-year series of case studies of educational reform in Pittsburgh. His national and local documentation research projects received funding from the Ford, Kellogg, Hilton, R.K. Mellon and Grable foundations, the National Science Foundation, the California Endowment, the National Humanities Center and the Lilly Endowment. His later research was related to higher education access and attainment, including studies related to the Pittsburgh Promise Initiative led by the EFL’s current director, Jennifer Iriti.
“Bill was a very jovial colleague to work with; he disarmed people with his humor,” recalled Iriti, also assistant vice chancellor for research inclusion and outreach strategy and a research scientist at the LRDC. She worked with Bickel for nearly 18 years, first when she was a graduate student, and remembers that he was always stopping by a bakery to bring sweets to a meeting.
“He always made space for everybody to be relaxed and to grow and to learn and to contribute,” she said. “It didn’t matter that you were a graduate student, he made everyone feel that your expertise, insights and ideas were equally valuable.”
As a colleague and collaborator, she said, “one of his greatest qualities was that he was always able to see the highest level strategic need in a group — he could bring people together who might have difficulty working together.”
She remembered one particular group of educators who seemed unable to make use of the data Bickel’s research team, on which she was serving, had provided. Some clients, Iriti said, “seemed impervious to data; they just wouldn’t take the requisite action.” Frustrated, the Pitt team turned to Bickel.
He was a reader of philosophy, and immediately thought to bring up Albert Camus’ take on the Greek myth of Sisyphus pushing the rock up the hill forever. “Camus would imagine Sisyphus happy in his work,” Iriti says Bickel told his research team. “And we would say, ‘Oh no, that is the worst pep talk ever.’” But it refocused them on the joy of the work, Iriti said.
As Iriti added in a remembrance offered to the family: “Bickel nurtured hundreds of graduate students throughout his career, helping them learn to think about contextualized approaches to using social science research methods to support policy and practice. He was a pragmatist, often reminding his perfectionist students who were spiraling during their dissertations, ‘This is your first good work, not your last great one!’ His teaching style mirrored who he was: reflective and thoughtful but infused with humor and humanity.”
His EFL work, “pioneered in the 1980s … ranged from the impactful study of the Pittsburgh Teacher Center to supporting various philanthropic organizations in using evaluation in their practice.”
Bickel retired in 2015.
He is survived by his wife of 51 years, Donna DiPrima Bickel, his son Jonathan (Julie) and their children Ellie and Owen, and his son Alex (Michy McCreary)
Memorial gifts are suggested to the Westborough Food Pantry, 9 E. Main St., Westborough, MA 01581.
— Marty Levine