What OBE is -
A WHITE KNIGHT TO THE RESCUE OR A DISASTER IN THE MAKING?
There is widespread public awareness that our public schools in Oregon have failed to educate our children. There is an equally widespread clamor for change. The people want schools to be good again. This was the excuse for introducing Outcome Based Education. OBE will cure all our problems by restructuring the schools to meet the desires of the people and the needs of children. OBE is the white knight to the rescue. Or is it?
Since in recent decades our schools have been run more and more bureaucratically, adopting more and more new and experimental programs, engaging more and more in social engineering instead of traditional education, one might conclude that public schools over the past three decades have been systematically weaned away from their function of education. Indeed, when one looks into the history of educational policy management at all levels, one can argue convincingly that the educational effectiveness of our public schools has been systematically destroyed in order that something like Outcome Based Education, OBE, could be brought in to "save" the schools.
While such a notion is alarmingly consistent with the theories of the experts who developed and implemented OBE (to achieve change, first introduce "dissonance" to produce confusion and the consequent desire for change, they advise), there is little appearance of that when OBE first arrives on the scene. OBE has the appearance of being "local" in origin, a system devised uniquely by people on the actual site of the schools to solve the immediate problems of each individual school. But that is mere appearance. OBE is a cleverly packaged system of schooling handed down through federal and state educational bureaucracies which skilled experts, called facilitators and change agents, implant into each school district. On the surface it looks good to pupils, teachers and parents. They like it because, if nothing else, it feels good. Its initial phase of implementation is designed to be easy to swallow, smoothing things out in preparation for the changes to come.
The first thing that leads one to question OBE is discovery that it is not a system invented by experienced educators. Instead it was developed and is managed and guided by a fanatical group of sociologists and psychologists originally funded and directed by an assortment of tax-exempt foundations. Principal among them is the Carnegie Corporation, which has sponsored and led the key organizations that have developed and implemented OBE; and the Rockefeller Foundation, which funds several key organizations involved in the school restructuring movement, organizations which are guided by regents or boards of directors on which a man named David Rockefeller holds membership and calls the shots personally or through his representatives. And David Rockefeller, whatever else he may be, is not an educator.
Taking a deeper look at OBE, we discover that it is not about education at all. At least, not in terms of traditional academically-based, teacher-directed instruction that once was the foundation of American education until the social engineers began whittling away at it back in the 1960s.
The fundamental strategy of the restructuring movement known as Outcome Based Education is elimination of all moral and psychological barriers to social change. Why social change? Because the political, industrial and banking leaders who lead our society have concluded that, the way the world is going, it will be politically and economically unmanageable in the very near future. OBE is a crucial part of the solution to their management problem.
The ultimate objective is to gain socio-political control over all present and future generations of children, conditioning them to be cooperative and pliable workers and citizens who will go along with the New World Order. OBE will be the tool by which those children will be conditioned to operate cooperatively in the New World Order. That "Order" will be an egalitarian society (run by a small elite) marked by total conformity to and control by the ideas of those in charge of the state, in accordance with state-specified values and attitudes. This is the classic notion of Fabian Socialism carried to its logical extreme.
OBE is thus global in concept, socialistic in philosophy, and anti-patriotic. It's design is based on a comprehensive view of the future a generation or two on out into the twenty first century. The sociologists work back from that concept to determine what education must be today to accommodate that presumed future.
The outcomes of OBE are thus designed to produce an educational product (a student) who will function appropriately in that future. THIS IS THE KEY TO OBE. Those outcomes, these experts have determined, are only incidentally and at best secondarily what we would call academic. Instead, they are fundamentally associated with what one might call a view of the world, what the philosophers call a weltanschauung. And that is less an intellectual grasp of what the world is all about than it is felt understanding, a nexus of attitudes and dispositional feelings about the world and our place in it. And that is what the "outcomes" of OBE would restructure.
The crucial point is that the educational outcomes that a graduate must possess to matriculate from the OBE system are attitudinal and relate to values, not to academic skills. Paramount above everything is that the student's outcome must include a high level of self esteem. He must believe and feel that he is the nicest, best, or whatever positive feeling is appropriate to the learning situation, no matter what the reality is due to his basic possession or lack of talent or intelligence. No matter what his capabilities and capacities, no matter where they place him in the order of things, he must feel good about himself so that he will be satisfied first of all with OBE itself, and then with where he finds himself in the social, economic and political order that the experts in world governments are creating for him to live in. OBE will produce this sort of satisfied, happy person because he or she will be able to succeed in mastering everything the system has to offer. That it isn't very much academically, is not beside the point. For if you educate children too well, at least some of them will be apt to challenge the new order of things.
The masters of OBE have gained control of the educational system virtually everywhere in the nation, and have established legislation, implementation plans, schedules, and educational goals that are identical from state to state. In each instance they are instituting a system that is:
1. Brainwashing, not education. It uses Skinnerian techniques of psychological conditioning to obtain politically correct and compliant, dumbed-down workers who feel good about themselves.
2. Challenges traditional family values and religiously-based Judeo-Christian moral absolutes by developing a morality of relativism based on what feels good in situations. The objective is destruction of the Judeo-Christian culture and the conceptual and attitudinal anchors that underlie the ideals of individualism and freedom that dominate our prevailing world view.
3. Undermines academic excellence by deemphasizing, eliminating or lowering academic standards such that all students can meet all requirements. Meanwhile it adds other standards which are attitudinal and affective, politically correct, verified by behaviors having nothing to do with academics. OBE focuses on changing behavior, attitudes, values, and feelings. These outcomes drive the system; where core academic subjects are taught, they are treated as processes only, used to achieve the real attitudinal goals. The system uses illegal psychological tests to assess those behaviors.
4. Makes a permanent record of the compliance of each child with these outcomes and, under that part of the law called "Parents as Teachers," intervenes in the family if necessary to obtain those outcomes. The laws are written so that families who object and resist the brain washing of their children can be prosecuted, lose jurisdiction over their children, and be forced into psychological counseling (at their own expense) until they have come around to the government's way of seeing things.
5. Makes that record on each child available to other agencies of the government and to prospective employers. Intends by law that a child who does not comply with outcomes will not get employed or be able to advance educationally.
6. Eliminates Carnegie Units (class hour credits in subjects) as a criterion for graduation; eliminates grading in favor of psychological testing of desired attitudinal outcomes.
7. Supplants the diploma with Certificates of Mastery (CIM and CAM), intermediate and advanced, at 10th and 12th grade equivalents. Forces fifteen- and sixteen-year-old students to make career decisions which become difficult for them to change, and reintroduces fixed "tracks" into the educational process. Keeps your children from receiving certificates if they disagree with the values taught in school, no matter how intellectually gifted or academically excellent they may be.
8. Increases length of school year and class length, in part to make possible the "remediation" of children who resist or reject the desired outcomes.
9. Makes the teacher into a "facilitator" or coach in place of conducting a directed learning environment.
10. Introduces "whole word" reading in place of phonics, and employs group, cooperative and coercive learning strategies in place of motivating individual initiative. The approach deemphasizes individual choices and decisions or the learning of self reliance. Replaces math drills with calculators, vocabulary building with feel-good choices, etc., as it takes the work out of academic learning.
11. Gives control of the system to educators (site based management) in place of school boards and school committees, and thus breaks the last bit of local community control over the educational process. It also assures control of the educators by the system, because teachers and administrators are mandated to learn and utilize the new system, and they will remain dependent upon it for their professional advancement and livelihood.
12. Holds top achievers back by making them teach slower students until all have met the behavioral standards. This allows most members of a group or class to achieve only a small fraction of the academic progress gained under the existing system, bad as it is. For greater detail than above, you are urged to read Ron Sunseri's book: OBE, Understanding the Truth about Education Reform, Questar Publishers, PO Box 1720, Sisters, OR 97759.
But how exactly does OBE work?
In OBE, a student must demonstrate an approved behavior defined by the state as the required outcome of the educational process. The state:
1. Sets a standard for "mastery" of a specified goal.
2. Tests to verify that the goal has been achieved.
3. Remediates a student who fails to meet the standard until he does.
The required outcomes are attitudinal, not academically based. They set outcome attitudes towards and behavioral capacity for adaptability to change, ethical judgment, family living, environment, understanding and appreciating others, and good citizenship (defined as active participation in and support of civic government).
The rhetoric of OBE says that children will proceed at their own pace and not be judged by "seat time." In practice, because of emphasis upon group learning strategies, all children in a group must achieve the goals before the group may move on, which puts tremendous pressure on a non-conformist to conform. This group orientation makes OBE a system for education of the group, not the individual. It is "collective" education in which competition is discouraged and the individual learns that the group is more important than the individual.
Each school district must develop a plan to meet OBE requirements, submit it to the state and, if state does not approve, or if the district will not fall into line, the state will take over the district. In practice, the state provides the plan to the district, so that the plan is essentially the same in all districts and in all states. A carrot and stick approach is used. If the district cooperates, it gets an open conduit to state and federal money. If it doesn't, it gets taken over at worst, doesn't get money at best.
Public Law 103-382, dated October 20 1994, provided $8 billion (yes, that is a B for billion) of grant money for spreading out to those states and school districts who accept the federal mandate to implement OBE in their schools. But that was just when getting started. Recent years have seen Federal Department of Education budgets well in excess of $50 billion.
OBE thus is being implemented as a national curriculum that is to be worked into the system in stages. The following explanation is condensed from Ron Sunseri's book, page 23ff, a book that every parent should buy and read from cover to cover, for we only touch on all that the book covers about OBE.
There are four stages in implementing outcome-based education. As you read you will begin to see a pattern that you may be experiencing in your own district. The transition from one stage of OBE to the next is accomplished through gradualism. Bill Spady, the "father of OBE," defines the stages as follows:
STAGE 1: TRADITIONAL OBE
Here OBE retains its traditional focus on traditional subject area knowledge (math, science, reading, etc.), outcome-based instruction is applied to the traditional disciplines. Shift is made to A,B,I grading (eighty percent = mastery; incomplete (I) doesn't count on grade point average). Teacher takes the role of coach or facilitator.
STAGE 2: LOW TRANSITIONAL OBE
The focus remains on academic subject areas with some OBE processes such as group collaboration, self assessment on performance terms using open-ended tests and demonstrations with scoring (rubrics) developed by teacher. A,B,I grading continues.
STAGE 3: HIGH TRANSITIONAL OBE
The instructional focus now shifts entirely to processes and competencies, using subject matter in hands-on, real-life experience situations. Future-driven competence outcomes from spheres of the psychological, sociological, political, using authentic, exit outcome-based performance assessments (portfolios, projects, etc.) Curriculum now becomes interdisciplinary (thematic, traditional disciplines integrated).
STAGE 4: TRANSFORMATIONAL OBE
Here the educational focus points to functioning in life-roles (knowledge, competence, and orientation towards the community as school, with it defining what we want the student to be like-values). What we now have are future conditions-driven life-role performance outcomes (psycho-socio-political focus) involving authentic role performances (apprenticeship, community service, working in community), with academic subject matters fully integrated into and effectively downgraded, emptied of much content (content is estimated by OBE authorities to be approximately 10 percent of traditional content), and submerged within thematic future-driven curriculum. The outcomes are scored by student- and expert-created rubrics (business and industry will assess and validate competencies through authentic life-role performances), awarding certificates of mastery leading to entry into workforce. Carnegie units are abandoned and criterion validation replaces grading with descriptions of competencies at each level.
In 1990: Dept. of Labor formed the Secretary's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills. Headed by Arnold Packer, author of 1987 report, Workforce 2000: Workers for the 21st Century." What it spells out are OBE objectives, pure and simple. This led to the School to Work Bill, which requires that states adapt their educational system to facilitate transition from schools into the workplace, and do it as stipulated by the Federal Government. If not, Federal money is cut off. Again, this is a setup for OBE, which is designed to create a flow of compliant, dumb, attitudinally correct cheap labor force.
Outcome-based education has a supporting strategy known as developmentally appropriate practices or DAP. While DAP is not technically connected to outcome-based education, proponents of OBE consider DAP imperative to the education of young children, which is why it accompanies the implementation of OBE everywhere. The National Association for the Education of Young Children has described DAP as follows: (again taken from Ron Sunseri's book, p 66ff)
Practice: There is an integrated curriculum where learning in all traditional subject areas occurs primarily through projects, learning centers, and play activities.
Meaning: No more directive teaching. No more content teaching. Young students will learn on their own by doing fun activities. In this model learning simply occurs, students don't strive to acquire knowledge.
Practice: Children learn through active involvement with each other, with adults and older children serving as informal tutors.
Meaning: Children learn from each other, not the teacher. The new role for the teacher is a passive tutor or facilitator. Older students are used as passive tutors as well.
Practice: Individual children or small groups work and play cooperatively or alone in learning centers on projects that they usually select themselves.
Meaning: Children self-direct their "learning." They are not directed by a teacher to do anything they don't want to do. Generally it is inappropriate for the teacher to select work for the student to accomplish. The child decides what is relevant.
Practice: The math and science programs enable children to use math and science through exploration, discovery, and solving relevant problems.
Meaning: No direct teaching and no rote learning of how to do sums or requiring the memorization of multiplication tables. Children will "explore" these subjects at learning centers.
Practice: Social studies themes are identified as the focus of work for extended periods of time and are learned through a variety of projects and playful activities involving independent research through reading, excursions, discussions, relevant use of language, etc.
Meaning: No directive teaching of content.
Practice: Art, music, movement, and drama are integrated activities in the learning process.
Meaning: Obvious.
Practice: Teachers promote socialization behavior, perseverance, industry, and independence by providing many stimulating and motivational activities.
Teachers promote the development of children's conscience and self-control through positive guidance techniques, including setting clear limits in a positive manner and involving children in establishing rules for their class and social living.
Meaning: Students begin to learn how to exhibit the behaviors required of them by outcomes.
Practice: Teachers view and accept parents as partners.
Meaning: The primary responsibility for the children lies with the school. Parents are only one part of a multi-faceted process. "Viewing" and "accepting" parents as partners establishes the teacher and school as the center of control. Parents must fit into the system and know their proper place.
Criticisms of OBE on the basis of external criteria are argumentive and arbitrary as far as supporters of OBE are concerned. But internal criticisms are telling. Ask: How do you measure outcomes? For example, the desired outcome of self esteem. How do you score it? How much self esteem is enough? Too much?
The only way of measuring such things is by psychological tests, which are illegal. Yet the government has set a standard which a student must meet in attitudes, values and beliefs.
Examples: On assessment test the pupil is asked:
Such questions expose a pupil's attitudes and feelings about other people, and tell nothing of his knowledge about the world.
Crucial to the system is the facilitator establishing and maintaining a "Locus of Control." The child must learn to go along with the group. If not, the process must create a conflict in the child that will lead to a change in that behavior. This operant conditioning technique becomes part of teacher retraining.
But how do you get teachers to be "facilitators"? They are subjected to "sensitivity training." which essentially is "group therapy," designed to upset the teacher's frame of reference. Then too, there is the usual coercion of the administrative system and the union which says, go along or get out.
The real goal of OBE, it thus becomes clear, is just what the experts say it is in their research journals. It is to condition the populace to rapid adaptability to change without protest. The outcome sought is a compliant, willing, unquestioning worker used to and desiring to cooperate with his fellows as a not too smart drone working in the global industrial complex managed by the global elite. These compliant drones include parents and teachers as well as pupils.
The immediate outcome for the child, parents report, may be rebellion in the home, irritability, nervousness, sleep walking and other psychological disorders.
The top ten percent of the students will be siphoned off from the system and trained for leadership, provided they have the proper attitudes. If not, they will be held back and dumbed down with the rest of the kids as material for the new global work force produced by NAFTA and GATT. If they do behave properly, they will be given extra opportunities to rise to the top of the New World (Government) Order.
This is not education designed to make a child the best he can be; but one that makes him the best the social elite wants him to be. It is a method for implementing a Fabian-like socialistic New World Order and a globalistic viewpoint. This outcome, visited upon a generation or two of functional illiterates dumbed down to where they don't know any better, will be to the advantage of the "controller" of the new society.
In the end, government schools using OBE cannot allow competing schools to survive, since they would produce better educated children and reveal the failure of OBE as a true educational system. They would also be breeding grounds for unreconstructed independent thinkers who might lead the drones in opposition to the new order of things. Therefore, the new laws provide that, when the experts deem the time is ripe, private and religious schools will be brought into the OBE system, and home schooling will be outlawed, all by the simple device that the teacher of any child must be certificated in the OBE technology and use it.
To make this happen, the Federal government and states are waiving or ignoring all sorts of laws. This includes the Hatch Amendment, which outlaws psychological testing in the schools. Indeed, the federal Education Act, H.R. 6, has provisions specifically allowing the educational establishment to disregard laws which may interfere with implementation of OBE.
The National Education Association has been a leader in the transformation process, enthusiastically hopping on board what the sociologists and psychologists have devised in the name of educational reform. In fact, the NEA not only supports the Federal Goals 2000 legislation now being implemented; the Ten Cardinal Principles of the NEA were virtually a blueprint for Goals 2000, which was no accident. David Rockefeller was an active participant in the NEA's development of those principles.
Goals 2000 is a federal blueprint for education, over-riding local control and establishing a mandatory curriculum from the top down. It has no concern for academics. It was developed by Chester Finn. The Goals 2000, Educate America Act, signed by Bill Clinton, is legislation specifying:
1. School based clinics. The ultimate goal is to provide life-long services to the child and his family, making the data developed by these clinics part of the total package of information on pupils and families.
2. OBE, with computer data tracking ultimately extending from birth to death.
3. Parents as teachers, requiring "experts" to come into the home to show parents how to bring up their children with the approved attitudes and values. Those who object or fail to cooperate will be labeled as child abusers and be liable for prosecution and loss of their children to the state. This is part of the guideline that "all kids will arrive at school ready to learn." This gives "experts" an entry into home from birth to graduation of child. If parents refuse to let the experts into the home, they are labeled "at risk" and may be penalized.
4. Race norming of testing. Those of different race, color or income status will be scored differently, recognizing that (at least at the outset) they cannot score as well as middle-class Anglos.
5. No parental privacy, no parental input to the schools. The child belongs to the state and the family is an open book to the state.
6. Establishes a new National School Board, which will:
7. Mandatory school standards relative to the number of teachers and their salaries, computers, etc.
8. National Educational Goals Panel , which will issue reports on how well each district is meeting the above 7 goals.
The Goals 2000 legislation thus established two new layers of educational bureaucracy at the Federal level: the National Educational Goals Panel, and the National Standards and Improvements Council. The first establishes the common educational goals, the second establishes the detailed standards and tests to assure compliance --- all on a national basis.
Bill Jasper writes, "Twisting through the confusing maze of Federal education agencies, bureaus, programs, grants and contracts runs a unifying thread, all leading toward the institution of a centrally controlled computer-based system of schooling employing the operant conditioning techniques of Behavioral Psychologist B. F. Skinner."
He continues, "Deceptive and psychologically manipulative courses, curricula, teaching methods and textbooks, running under the label of Mastery Learning, Competency Based Learning, or OBE, are replacing the traditional academic curriculum and causing havoc throughout the country as millions of students are purposefully being dumbed down."
Nancy Stable, a former high school teacher in Pennsylvania schools, describes the "values clarification" technique used in OBE. It is a method for teaching decision making that teaches a child to abandon all the traditional values and standards taught at home and church, teaches that there is no absolute right or wrong, but that each individual can choose for himself based on what is good for himself.
B. K. Eakman, in Educating for the New World Order (Halcyon House, Portland, OR 1991, pp 258-9), quotes William Bonner, Attorney for the Rutherford Institute:
"While the public has assumed it retains its historic input into education on a local school district level, in fact education has been progressively federalized, with the bold new America 2000 as the ultimate expression of the consolidation of power over education directed from Washington. The revised Chapters 3, 5, and 6 respond to Washington's demand that the states effect strict compliance with federal regulation in exchange for federal dollars. Freedom, diversity and local control are being increasingly sacrificed in that exchange.
"Undergirding this federalization of education has been a massive invasion of the family and the rights of individual students through curricula utilizing psychological programming and experimentation, as well as a broad spectrum of behavior modification techniques. Data periodically gathered through invasive testing within the affective domain has then, through the illegal demand for students' social security numbers...been compiled on computer systems storing vast amounts of intimate and private information on our children and youth, in violation of their constitutional rights...
"The traditional interests and rights of parents have been trampled upon, as educators have proceeded on the proposition that professionals know better than parents how to raise children...."
As for the Oregon reform law: It did nothing less than make OBE a required adoption by every school district in the state, whether school boards, parents or the local community like it or not.
Local control of education, like the wolf and the grizzly, is extinct in the formerly sovereign state of Oregon. Vera Katz (former Mayor of Portland), former Superintendent of Public Instruction Norma Paulus, and former Governor Barbara Roberts, those three nice, smiling ladies, sold us out to the globalists. Their successors, including now governor Kulongoski and Superintendent Susan Castillo, are docilely following in their footsteps, implementing the educational disaster known as No Child Left Behind.