Revenge of the blob - outcome-based education

National Review, Sept 12, 1994 by Ramesh Ponnuru

|WHEN I first heard about outcome-based education through my son's high school, I was excited,' says Alan Klaus of North Kansas City. "Finally they were talking about setting some standards. But the more I learned about it, the more concerned I became .... OBE is just not what it seems to be." Appointed by the Missouri Board of Education to a citizens' oversight committee, Mr. Klaus eventually co-wrote a report blasting the reforms he had initially welcomed.

Mr. Klaus's experience is not unique. More than thirty states have dabbled with some form of outcome-based education, and parents around the country have discovered that, despite its name, OBE has little to do with raising academic standards. Instead, it replaces existing standards with vague, often psychotherapeutic goals. These new goals become the criteria for assessing students, teachers, and schools.

OBE can be seen as an attempt to divert the movement for tougher educational standards that became influential in the Eighties. Ronald Reagan's Department of Education, particularly under William Bennett, operated on the assumption that American education had become unresponsive to the market it served. Reaganites therefore proposed initiatives to increase the influence of parents and taxpayers on the schools: a nationwide information network to publicize the track records of schools; national standards to raise the achievement of American students; and school vouchers to let parents' preferences reshape education. These reforms were opposed every step of the way by what Bennett calls "the blob": the educational establishment, consisting of teachers' unions and state bureaucracies.

Outcome-based education is the blob's counter-attack against these Reaganite initiatives. OBE prevents parents and taxpayers from assessing the academic progress of their local schools; de-emphasizes achievement in traditional subject areas; and allocates more money to each of public education's constituencies. With the exception of vouchers, which OBE advocates reject unconditionally, the method of this counter-attack is to detach the mechanisms of the reform movement from its goals.

Opposition has grown as parents have caught on to this con. OBE is hotly debated in states as different as Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Kentucky, and Colorado. Criticism has forced officials in many states to revise their OBE plans or even to drop them altogether, as Virginia Governor Douglas Wilder did last year. Opponents of OBE are so passionate that they sometimes ignore important differences between OBE plans, portraying them all as part of a nationwide conspiracy. But the truth is that OBE means different things in different places. In some states and districts, OBE involves a radical transformation of state assessment systems, curricula, even grading options; in others, OBE amounts to little more than the announcement of platitudinous goals.

If OBE takes its rhetoric from the 1980s standards movement, its ideology derives from an eclectic rehash of learning theories from the Sixties and Seventies. OBE descends in particular from a variant of applied behaviorism called "mastery learning." Under mastery learning, students were to be tested and retested on a unit of instruction until everyone could pass; only then could the class advance to the next unit. In essence, students could receive two scores on a test: "mastery" and "not yet." (Phyllis Schlafly, whose Eagle Forum has been in the forefront of opposition to OBE, quips, "Perhaps this is what they mean by |lifelong learning.'") Quick learners were to do "peer tutoring" to help the slower ones.

Like other egalitarian projects, mastery learning had perverse results. High achievers grew bored and frustrated; tests were dumbed down to speed up the slowest kids; and average students began to realize that they no longer had to study, since they could always repeat a test. "Incomplete" replaced "C" as the badge of mediocrity. When Chicago's elementary schools adopted mastery learning in the Seventies, the results drove parents to sue the school system for educational malpractice.

OBE and mastery learning share both a common philosophy and many of the same popularizers. Bill Spady, head of the pro-OBE High Success Network, admitted as much in a 1992 interview with Educational Leadership magazine: "In January of 1980 we convened a meeting of 42 people to form the Network for Outcome-based Schools. Most of the people who were there ... had a strong background in mastery learning, since it was what OBE was called at the time. But I pleaded with the group not to use the name |mastery learning' in the network's new name because the word |mastery' had already been destroyed through poor implementation."

Like mastery learning, OBE eschews the classification of students by ability or achievement. The National Center for Outcome-based Education declares that "failure should be removed from our vocabulary and thoughts" and that "children should never have to compete for learning or for grades. For the most part, we believe competition in the classroom is destructive."