By Connie Zhu, Reprinted from Christian American
April 1994 – In 1983 the National Commission on Excellence in Education published A Nation at Risk, alerting the public to America’s decline in academic performance. A flurry of educational reforms, designed to tighten failing standards of student performance, emerged—some of them poorly researched and inadequately tested.
One of the most problematic of those reforms was the Outcome-Based Education model developed by William Spady, director of the International Center on Outcome-Based Restructuring.
OBE is the fair-haired darling of the educational establishment elite, but critics contend that the untested experiment will actually result in the “dumbing down” of academic standards, the loss of qualified educators, and diminished parental control over the development of their children.
Also known as mastery learning, performance-based education, core curriculum, value-added testing, quality performance standards, re-learning, or restructuring, OBE is simply a system in which the desired outcomes of education are specified, and then students are tested periodically to determine if they are making adequate progress.
On paper OBE sounds and looks good, since most parents and teachers want students to achieve a certain set of academic standards. But the problem with the Spady model, now being proposed in some state legislatures, is that many of these outcomes are tied to non-academic feelings, emotions and personal evaluations.
“Outcome-based education is a major drastic move away from the traditional type of education based on the three R’s of Reading, Writing and Arithmetic. It’s a move to score children’s feelings, beliefs, and attitudes,” said Carolyn Steinke, director of the Desert City, California, chapter of Eagle Forum.
Steinke, who also serves on the board of Desert Sands Unified School District in Indio, California, has done extensive research over the last three years on the dangers of OBE. She and other OBE opponents believe that this system is not only a break with traditional education, but is a move by liberal educators toward the production of the politically correct global child.
According to the Report, a conservative multi-media resource center, the Department of Education and the National Education Association have banded together with liberal think tanks such as the Far West Regional Laboratory in California to promote OBE, and to oppose any efforts by parents or other citizens to spoil their educational goals.
Marguerite “Peg” Luksik, chairman of the Pennsylvania Parents’ Commission, has fought hard against the implementation of OBE in her state, where the House of Representatives voted 148 to 51 last summer to prohibit the state Education Department from introducing mandated outcomes statewide.
“It’s the biggest issue they’ve ever had, that they literally don’t know what to do with it,” said Luksik. “We’ve literally had representatives stand on the floor of the House and say, ‘Can we please defeat this, so my office can do something other than Outcome-Based Education?’
“So it’s a huge issue. That revolution has now spread throughout the country. So now this is a tremendously controversial issue everywhere and parents are learning it,” continued Luksik.
Experiments with OBE restructuring programs are presently going on in various school districts throughout over 40 states, according to a Special Report prepared by the National Center for Home Education, based in Virginia. So far no states have yet implemented OBE as a statewide mandated program.
The major states now experimenting with OBE include Pennsylvania, Minnesota, New York, California, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Iowa, Hawaii, Colorado, and Washington. Other states where OBE will be considered in state legislatures soon include Alabama, Oregon, and Ohio.
One major victory in 1993 occurred in Virginia, where Republican gubernatorial candidate George Allen campaigned against the push by state education officials to bring in OBE. Public sentiment forced Gov. Doug Wilder to cancel the OBE scheme in a futile effort to salvage the Democratic ticket.
Outcome-Based Education mandates that each child demonstrate state-approved outcomes to state standards before the child can be promoted or graduate. These are all-encompassing, rather than strictly academic, and are related to family life, personal development, environmental issues, citizenship and self-esteem – outcomes currently controlled by parents rather than the state. The time it takes to reach these goals is variable – students can take as long as they need or want to meet the state-mandated outcomes.
According to Luksik, the powerful NEA teachers union is committed to establishing OBE nationwide. One pro-OBE workshop centered around how to deal with parental opposition, including those from the “Christian Right.”
“The workshop leader recommended finding the most radical person to represent their [the parents’] side – the one that’s the most inarticulate, the one that makes mistakes and states the case wrong – give that person all the time to talk, because they’ll turn everybody else off in the audience,” noted Luksik. “And the ones that are articulate and really have learned it and know it – don’t give them time to talk.
“Begin your speeches by saying, ‘Well, I’m a Baptist, Lutheran, Catholic, Methodist, Presbyterian, whatever, but I’m not this radical.’”
The goal of OBE is simple: “We expect a new kind of student who is not passive and mindlessly obedient, who questions authority, who requires, even demands justifiable reasons for completing a given task.... Teachers and parents will need to serve as mentors, guides and coaches in the process of negotiating win-win agreements when students are buying into an increasingly challenging learning goal.”
But so far the “learning goals” presented by OBE have been anything but challenging. In fact, there’s a de-emphasis on academics. Unlike traditional education where 80% was a C, 80% is now considered an A, or what’s known as “mastery level” in OBE.
According to Steinke, every study done shows that the lowering of academic standards has been a major failure of OBE. In Chicago, for example, where OBE was used for 10 years, the students tested out at the 25th percentile, and in five schools scored in the 5th percentile.
In 1987 San Marco High School in Texas was selected as one of the top high schools in the state, ranking 29th out of more than 1,100 schools. Desiring to make a good thing better, San Marco implemented an OBE program in 1990. Two years later, the number of 11th-graders able to pass all sections on a standardized test dropped from 50% to 36%, even though the state average had gone up.
“After an intensive six-week study of the OBE literature, we believe it to be a plausible hypothesis that certain aspects of this theory actually generate the negatives you’ve seen,” Joanne Carson, a professor at the University of Texas, testified to the Texas state board of education.
OBE was also the subject of a 1987 Mastery Learning Reconsidered study by Johns Hopkins University, funded by the U.S. Department of Education.
“If some students take much longer than others to learn a particular objective, then one of two things must happen. Either corrective instruction must be given outside of regular class time, or students who achieve mastery early will have to waste considerable amounts of time waiting for their classmates to catch up. There is essentially no evidence to support the effectiveness of group-based mastery learning on standardized achievement measures,” stated Robert Slavin, director of the study.
Traditionally, students had a certain amount of time, such as a semester, to complete academic work, for which credit was awarded along with a grade based on the level of achievement. These earned credits were then applied toward graduation. But there are no deadlines for assignments under the typical OBE model. Tests can be retaken as often as students desire without penalty.
“The kids have got the system figured out. Whenever there’s a football game or favorite show on TV the night before a test, the kids say ‘Why study? I’ll just take this test and fail it. I can always take the retest later, they can’t fail me, so who cares,’” remarked Cheri Yecke, a former Minnesota teacher with extensive knowledge about OBE.
Yecke cited South Washington County, Minnesota, in January of 1992, as having over 15,000 incompletes reported for 5,000 students in grades 7-12 who participated in an OBE program. The incomplete grades did not count in the student’s grade point average. It was possible to take six classes, get an A in physical education, take five incompletes, and end up with a 4.0 GPA.
There are also problems when co-operative learning replaces individual competition. In one Minnesota school district this has resulted in violence.
“The freeloading group members, who were tired of being coerced into having to work, reacted with violence. The overworked group members reacted with violence,” reported Yecke. “And there have been fistfights and verbal threats related to cooperative learning, both on and off the school grounds.”
Teachers and students both suffer in trying to implement OBE, and some of the most competent, dedicated, and experienced teachers are leaving.
Luksik says this loss is permanent. Even if OBE is completely ousted within the next five years, the public schools have still lost their best educators.
Another drawback to OBE is its enormous cost, which must be financed by the taxpayers. For OBE to work, there must be a way of remediating and documenting, which requires computerization. Steinke estimates that a school can easily spend $750,000 in three years in order to do the necessary restructuring.
One example of the expense is the Kentucky Department of Education, which received an initial $19.5 million from the state legislature to pay for assessing children in OBE programs. A short time later they requested and received an additional $10 million. After a month, the Department of Education said they really needed $80 million.
There is also a danger involved with these computerized student data banks, because they contain more than just academic information. According to U.S. Department of Labor reports, OBE student data banks include medical records, insurance status, Department of Motor Vehicles records, personal records, and other evaluations on integrity, honesty, ethics and self-esteem. With this type of information, Steinke said, it is easier to achieve the goal of politically correct students.
Luksik believes that this is one issue that will impact every child, even if school choice initiatives are passed. “Parents may think they won because they have the right to move their child from location to location, but if the state can mandate that every location must inculcate the same poison, just picking your poison delivery system—that’s not victory, that’s defeat,” she said.
In one of Luksik’s national debates, her opponent asked her, “Don’t you want students to learn in a democracy instead of totalitarianism? And I said no. I want schools to teach that democracy is better than totalitarianism. Once I mandate that a child believe it, I have totalitarianism.” 
