Negotiating the Challenge of OUTCOME-BASED EDUCATION

School Administrator, Sept, 1994 by Linda Chion-Kenney

To some people, Spady is a brilliant, abstract, precise thinker who demands intellectual rigor. His model of OBE illuminates what schools and school systems need to do to better prepare students for life and work in the 21st century. The model provides the tools to use and the questions to ask to help communities determine what teachers and students should spend a lot of "learning time doing."

To other people, Spady is his own worst enemy, complicating an issue already laden with educational jargon and failing to anticipate and warn his clients about the backlash that could--and did--erupt with the writing of outcomes linked to values and attitudes.

"We were dealing with education reform, not politics, and I don't think anybody anticipated that things so clearly stated and defined could be politically so distorted and that people would take those distortions to be true," Spady says.

John Artis, managing administrator for the High Success Network and a former high school principal, takes the criticisms to heart. "To some degree we were the victims of our own success," he says. "From 1991 to 1993, we had more work than we could keep up with. States and school districts were asking for help, and suddenly OBE became a national movement.

Organizationally, Artis adds, "we were a service organization, providing a service to people who wanted to buy that service. We never thought of ourselves as a research organization. Maybe it was a false hope, that others would do the research to answer the types of questions we were getting."

The network now, however, is taking on that function, working to identify OBE success stories and to disseminate units of instruction from an OBE perspective that real people use in real practice.

For his own part, Spady has continued his discussions with Simonds, hoping to clarify the areas in which they can agree and those in which they cannot. (Arnold Burron, a professor at University of Northern Colorado, representing Simonds, was part of a public forum in July at a leadership institute sponsored by the High Success Network.)

Simonds, for his part, appears to be in the OBE fight for the long run. He wrote in his May/June newsletter: "We look for real progress in finding common ground and stand ready to seek a peaceful solution to the current stand-off, without compromising our position" (his emphasis).

The Central Question

As Ronald Brandt of the ASCD sees it, Spady's work, and anything else said to be done in the name of OBE, has come under attack because it makes clear the fundamental issues of the education reform movement. The key issue is this: Should the school curriculum be thought of as a collection of separate subjects or should it deal directly with the demands of life outside of school?

Asking that question, Brandt says, raises other issues: On what basis do you decide what to teach? Who decides? Where does that get decided--at the federal, state, local, or schoolhouse level? Who gets involved in those decisions? And to what extent should schools try to play a role in reforming society?