Will outcome-based education result in mind control of our children or bring about long-awaited school reform?
For 20 years, William Spady has been the nation’s chief promoter of an educational philosophy called “outcome-based education.” He says he felt “like the Maytag repairman” for most of that time “waiting for states and school districts to call.”
Those days are gone. Claiming that it will bring about the true reform required to prevent American students from falling further behind their counterparts in the rest of the Western world, educators have been streaming toward OBE for the past five years. Many school districts have embraced it, and many state education departments are committed to implementing it in the next several years.
Yet opposition to OBE is exploding as well. Within the past year, numerous conservative activists have begun working for its demise. A groundswell has developed, with hundreds of curious parents packing informational meetings around the country—and confronting school officials with their worries. Concerned Women for America (CWA) is putting together a “war manual” to fight OBE nationwide, and spokesperson Jan Parshall calls it “the single biggest issue” in education.
As the principal vehicle for the educational establishment’s school-reform strategy, Spady’s brainchild has joined other lightning-rod issues such as school choice, sexuality education, and multiculturalism in the debate over the future of our nation’s schools.
Achieving set goals
Essentially, OBE involves the setting of educational goals—“outcomes”—that students must reach before finishing school. Those goals determine teaching methods and ways of measuring student achievement. The idea is to set high expectations for all students and then give them expanded opportunities to meet those marks.
“Success in school is of limited benefit unless students are equipped to transfer that success to life in a complex, challenging, high-tech future,” says Spady, who is founder of the Colorado-based High Success Network, and who consults with dozens of school systems. “Our prevailing, century-old, Industrial Age curriculum structure and delivery model lack credibility.”
OBE rejects rigid “input” standards, including time requirements for individual academic subjects, for the school year itself—even for how many years it takes for a child to finish school. It junks traditional testing and grading in favor of “real-life” demonstrations of knowledge that, it is argued, better prepare kids for life as adults.
Margaret Roberts, director of public affairs for the Virginia Department of Education (DOE), says that it is performance-based. “We’re focused more on results than ever before.”
However, the proliferating critics of OBE charge that it is a dangerous, and educationally wrongheaded, experiment in social engineering. They maintain that it will hurt academic achievement, “dumb down” learning standards, diminish parental authority and substitute professional educators’ values, invade privacy, and cost too much.
“It can just be all about mind-changing and attitude changing rather than real education,” William Bennett, former secretary of education, recently told psychologist James Dobson during a “Focus on the Family” radio broadcast. “When you combine this with ‘political correctness’ and the ambitions of a lot of professionals in the school business, it’s [meant] to recruit people to a political point of view—not to educate them, but to sign them up.”
Ted Mueller, a Hales Corner, Wisconsin, activist against OBE, says that it is a tool for educational elites to “control society” and encourage “group conformity.”
The two critical arguments over OBE involve academic subjects and values.
Spady and other OBE apologists don’t believe that grades measure anything and that “time-based traditions” and “content-dominated categories” don’t teach anything. Instead, he says, OBE emphasizes “high-level competencies such as critical thinking, effective communication, technological applications, and complex problem solving.”
Spady compares OBE to merit badges. The Boy Scouts “establish a clear set of … substantive expectations, not scores, not grades,” he says. “What and whether a kid can do something successfully is more important than when and how.”
“OBE is simply setting expectations for our high-school graduates,” says Ken Cole, executive director of the Wisconsin Association of School Boards. “It means defining what we want our graduates to know and to be able to do when they leave our public schools.”
Advocates assert only gifted students learn under the “traditional paradigm” of education, and that OBE will more effectively teach a greater number of kids. To help take up the slack in their own educational progress, academically advanced students would be expected to help teach their slower peers.
Lowering standards?
Critics say America needs true, competitive academic rigor and that, instead, OBE is fundamentally anti-intellectual and promotes mediocrity. They call it a “Robin Hood” approach to learning that would rob good students but, by lowering standards, actually sell short the poor and minority students in the nation’s largest cities.
“If it were successfully implemented, it would resegregate our schools,” says Sylvia Kraemer, an academic who has written two damning monographs about OBE. “OBE is tailored for vocational ed, not college prep. I’m reluctant to say that kind of education is adequate for anybody.”
The Chicago Independent School Board ended an OBE-type program—after investing millions of dollars over five years—when students consequently fell behind on standardized tests.
Critics believe OBE will lower educational standards. They say that if every child playing basketball was required to make a basket, wouldn’t the hoop have to be lowered to achieve that goal?
Nevertheless, values instruction may be the most volatile part of the OBE issue. Spady says OBE stresses “broad attitudinal, affective motivational and relational qualities” designed to yield a “competent future citizen” and to “improve quality of life in their local and global environments.” Unlike traditional subjects, courses, and skills, he says, these are “higher-order, life-role performances.”
To critics, those sound like mushy aims that open the door to indoctrination so that students’ core beliefs, as well as tangible competencies, can be molded to fit mandated outcomes. And they are convinced that OBE zealots, as well as many teachers and public-school administrators, would encourage the imparting of liberal values contrary to those of parents.
One of Minnesota’s proposed outcomes, for example, is for children to “understand diversity and the interdependence of people.” Pennsylvania wants students to demonstrate the ability to make “environmentally sound decisions in their personal and civic lives.” Critics say Virginia’s goals include requiring subordination of the self to the subjective approval of the group and students demonstrating an “openness and a desire for new ideas.”
Spady says such ideas “don’t inherently belong to OBE.” Yet Mueller says Spady shows his orientation in writings that express alarm about the “major rise in religious and political orthodoxy, intolerance, fundamentalism and conservatism with which young people will have to be prepared to deal.”
Opponents also are concerned about privacy because of “electronic portfolios” that some say OBE would establish for tracking student compliance.
And foes maintain that the cost of an OBE-driven overhaul of teacher-training and instructional materials would be monumental—perhaps by itself reason enough to ditch the approach. The Virginia Taxpayers Association has estimated that OBE could boost state education costs by as much as $500 million.
State battlegrounds
With coming elections, Virginia has become the hottest battleground over OBE. Opponents are trying to make an issue of the state’s proposed OBE program, the Common Core of Learning (CCL). “We want to make candidates take a stand one way or another,” says Arthur J. Evans, chairman of a parents’ group called Concerned Virginians for Academic Excellence. The Family Foundation, Eagle Forum, and CWA also are involved.
Meanwhile, Virginia education officials and allies are putting lots of resources into promoting CCL, printing bumper stickers, hosting “ecumenical lunches” with mainline religious leaders, and distributing form letters that supporters can sign and send to local newspapers. But Roberts, of the Virginia DOE, says officials spent a lot of time at packed concerned parent meetings around the state answering the basic question: “We don’t get it: Why are you doing this?”
Robert Holland, editorial columnist for the Richmond Times-Dispatch, says he’s “never encountered so much interest on any topic. It’s so pervasive, there’s so much loaded into OBE, that people are getting a little fed up with being jerked around.”
Much the same debate is occurring in Wisconsin, where Mueller, a salesman and local school board member, is leading opposition to the state’s proposed OBE program through an organization he cofounded, Independent School Board Members of Wisconsin. More than 500 people have attended each of several OBE informational sessions.
“People are waking up slowly, as their children are affected by parts of the program,” says Nancy Moore, school board member in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin. In many cases, the more parents understand OBE the more they become suspicious of it, further exposing the wide ideological chasm between educational elites and many American parents.
The two sides are not completely predictable. Some business executives support OBE because they are desperate for anything that promises better workers. At the same time, many teachers have serious misgivings about the aims and practicality of OBE.
Most vocal critic
Parents have formed the rank-and-file of the opposition. “We’re mommies, people who work off their kitchen tables, talking on the phone, sharing what we believe,” says Peg Luksik of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. She has become the nation’s highest-profile outcome-based education foe.
Spady charges that activists such as Luksik have “paralyzed serious school reform and improvement efforts in many districts across the country” and “seriously misrepresented” OBE. He says he is “puzzled and confused” about how it became “a religious issue.” And he asserts that, while some schools have implemented aspects of OBE such as eliminating grades and substituting “whole language” for phonics instruction, no one can judge the philosophy yet because it has not been fully implemented anywhere.
“If you want to experiment, let the districts volunteer to experiment,” Luksik responds. “If you mandate [OBE] and it doesn’t work out, the state can go in and change it after a few years. But my 10-year-old can’t go back to do it again.… You don’t take a product that’s still in research and development and put it on the shelf for sale.”
Christian, Home Schools See Grim Future If Obe Succeeds
Christian school administrators and home education advocates are wary of OBE, fearing its spread in public schools will have a detrimental impact on students in the classroomand in life.
“It’s a sinister thing, as Orwellian as you can get,” says John W. Whitehead, founder of the Rutherford Institute in Charlottesville. “It could alienate home schoolers from institutions and really make them be the odd people out.” He foresees OBE shaping driver’s-license exams, student work permits, and employer standards. Whitehead says some states will require students, including those in Christian and home schools, to conform to “politically correct” views on such issues as abortion, homosexuality, and environmentalism in order to enter college or start a job.
Home educators will become vulnerable as states adopt OBE standards that require “equivalency” in curriculum or demonstrated results, says Inge Cannon of the National Center for Home Education in Washington.
“Christian school educators will need to prepare their graduates to cope with a secular generation schooled in ‘political correctness,’ ” says Paul Kienel, head of the Association of Christian Schools based in La Habra, California. “Unfortunately, many of our graduates will face an avalanche of ‘politically correct’ thinking if they enroll in secular colleges or universities.”
Tom Wheeler of the American Association of Christian Schools in Blue Springs, Missouri, says OBE values pose a college and business risk. “Christian high schools are wondering whether their diplomas will be recognized.”
Two years ago the Pennsylvania DOE told the state’s 501 school districts that a version of OBE would be phased into all public schools by 1996. The mandates included a list of 52 specific “outcomes” students must demonstrate before they graduate. Parents and taxpayers who questioned the Education Department about the plan were given contradictory information or surly silence, Luksik says. Studies of OBE schools in other states, led by Luksik’s Pennsylvania Parents Commission, turned up what she considers important evidence against the innovation.
A shrill battle followed. State lawmakers last year ordered the DOE to delay implementing the program until costs and effectiveness are better defined. In the meantime, grassroots taxpayer and church groups circulated stories of an “OBE conspiracy” and curricula of classroom condom demonstrations, “New Age” religion and witchcraft, and homosexuality.
Under pressure from parents and educators, the state House of Representatives cobbled a compromise, voting 148 to 51 to make the OBE plan an optional innovation for each school district. The “OBE option bill” has been sent to a Senate panel for study.
Meanwhile, some conservatives across the nation are pushing their own reforms, including school choice and raising standards in traditional academic subjects measured by conventional standards. Projects include the Modern Red Schoolhouse, sponsored by the Indianapolis-based Hudson Institute. It will be tested this year in three Indiana school districts, one in North Carolina, and one in New York.
Spady says this school year will be a difficult one, but he believes OBE will prevail because foes will lose interest.
But opponents seem motivated. “We’re in a battle over whether public-education monopoly is in the best interests of all the students in the nation,” says Mueller, “and whether people should be paying for a system that’s intellectually and morally bankrupt.”
By Dale D. Buss, with reports from Rebekah Schreffler.
