In this commentary for the special issue on the social and character development (SACD) research program, the author identifies some of the dilemmas facing practitioners attempting to do evaluation research in SACD in schools and discusses some of the related concerns raised in this issue's papers. His familiarity with the SACD program derives first from their center's use of one of the primary instruments used in the cross-site part of the SACD research program, the Child Report (Kaminski et al., this volume), which is briefly described in this paper. The SACD research program represents an important attempt to raise the bar in examining the kind of research that can bring credibility to school-based efforts to promote positive developmental outcomes for students, and deserves to be closely watched as these and other papers appear. The collaboration between Department of Education and the CDC is a welcome bridge building effort to combine research expertise and resources to bear on what should be common goals in healthy child development. (Contains 2 notes.)