Negotiating the Challenge of OUTCOME-BASED EDUCATION

School Administrator, Sept, 1994 by Linda Chion-Kenney

A Progressive Movement Under Seige Tries to Clarify the Issue

A lot of people in Palmer, Alaska, were surprised when Ell Sorenson put his house up for sale and even more so when he lost his job. No one was more surprised than the schools chief himself.

"If somebody had told me this is the way my career would end, I never would have believed it," says Sorenson, the former superintendent for the Matanuska-Susitna Borough School District.

After enduring a campaign of "insidious ignorance" waged against his values and beliefs, Sorenson, a self-described "goody two-shoes" and God-fearing Christian with 34 years in the profession, learned last February that his contract would not be renewed, despite votes of confidence from teachers, principals, and classified staff.

It was then, Sorenson says, that he remembered a warning he had received almost a year earlier from a member of the local chapter of Citizens for Excellence in Education, a Christian ministry dedicated to restoring godly morals in public schools.

"They're going after OBE," the informant said. "Watch out."

Arguable Merits

OBE, or outcome-based education, rests on the premise that all students can learn and succeed (but not on the same day in the same way), that success breeds success, and that schools control many critical conditions of that success. Proponents say OBE provides a framework for drafting high standards and for holding students accountable to them, measuring achievement not by the number of classes they take or credits they earn, but what they know and what they are able to do with the knowledge they gain--not only on tests, but also in projects and performances.

To critics, OBE is not entirely without merit. Who could argue with setting specific goals (outcomes) for student learning and then aligning curriculum, instruction, and testing (inputs) to help students meet those goals? Who could argue that the more you expect of kids, the more they are likely to do? Who could argue that students should be doing more than "doing time" at their desks?

But critics want to know who sets the outcomes? What outcomes? And how will they be measured? What will happen to a child's motivation, and to the academically gifted and talented, if all students are expected to earn top grades? Will the smart students be held back while the slow students catch up? If children are allowed to retake tests, will they try as hard on the original? If everybody succeeds, does that mean nobody fails? And if nobody fails, are students really being prepared for the competitive world of work?

These are a few of the sundry concerns raised over outcome-based education, as well as other education initiatives, such as strategic planning, flexible grouping, cooperative learning, performance-based assessment, non-graded primary schools, computer learning, and even the whole language approach to reading instruction. The critics lump these under the OBE umbrella.

As Ira Simonds, a mentor teacher in the Antelope Valley, Calif., Union High School District, says: "It sounds like anything that's new, that's different, that isn't traditional is suspect."

But the OBE attack goes deeper, as evidenced by the overarching concern advanced by several conservative Christian organizations, most notably Robert Simonds' Citizens for Excellence in Education, which says it shares "extensive information" with Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum, Beverly LaHaye's Concerned Women for America, Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition, and James Dobson's Focus on the Family.

CEE's Public School Awareness kits are designed to help parents organize and shape their views and elect religious conservatives to public office.

To Simonds (no relation to Ira Simonds), OBE represents a conspiracy by secular humanist educators and New Age bureaucrats and politicians to usher in a new world order by engaging in a massive experiment in behavior modification and social engineering. The aim, Simonds says, is to use public schools and tax dollars to promote a "politically correct agenda" in areas such as environmentalism, multiculturalism, and global citizenship (as opposed to national sovereignty), and to undermine parental authority and religious beliefs.

In making these claims, Simonds and his supporters capitalize on the public's fear of change ("Why change the rules this late in the game for my child's education?"), fear of the unknown ("Are they really brainwashing kids in the second grade?"), ready acceptance of hearsay as evidence ("OBE will teach my child homosexuality is okay"), and willingness to accept all research as sound.

For example, a 1987 study of group-based mastery learning has been touted widely as evidence of OBE's failings, even though the study's author, Robert Slavin of Johns Hopkins University, has vehemently opposed this use of his research as "totally irresponsible and inappropriate." Slavin routinely attaches a one-page admonition to his work, noting that what he studied "has little in common with OBE."

Public Ignorance