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"Opponents have several objections, but one is primary: The outcomes are nebulous, hard to measure, and ... concern attitudes, values, beliefs and emotions rather than academic achievement," said Bruno Manno, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, in a recent scholarly look at the OBE controversy. Alarmed parents argue that OBE reeks of social engineering and behavior modification and are forming grassroots networks to resist educators who are pushing OBE as the cure-all for underachievement.
Tarring all education reform with a broad brush, the harshest critics have slapped the OBE label on numerous progressive education theories and practices percolating in the schools, making OBE the whipping boy for all of the changes they believe are leading to further "dumbing down" of education. Classroom practices they see as manifestations of OBE include cooperative learning; deemphasis of competition; heterogeneous grouping of children of vastly different abilities; multiculturalism and self-esteem courses; scorning of rote memorization of multiplication tables, spelling words and historical dates; and the abandonment of traditional testing and grades in favor of checklists of goals attained and protfolios of work. Critics also equate OBE with "mastery learning" in which teachers teach until every child has learned the concept and passed a test on it. Children may retake tests until they pass.
Phyllis Schlafly, president of the conservative watchdog group Eagle Forum and an OBE foe, recently derided the following "antiacademic" pupil outcomes sought in Kentucky's OBE plan:
* Establish goals for improving and maintaining self-esteem. Plan, implement and record accomplishments.
* Identify and analyze stressful situations in your life.
* Interview a graduate from a substance-abuse program; create a case study of his or her drug history.
* Examine the mental and emotional wellness of past or present world leaders.
OBE's kindest critics think it's a good idea that has been hijacked. "The idea of OBE is perfectly sound," says American Federation of Teachers President Albert Shanker. "What else would you want except to measure the outcomes? Get away from the idea of how much money we spend on kids, what the class size is, how many hours a kid spends in class, how many courses he's taken. That doesn't tell you what he's learned. What we want are the outcomes." But Shanker acknowledges the theory can be abused. "Unfortunately, some folks got hold of the outcomes and decided that they didn't care very much about academic outcomes. What they wanted to know were touchy-feely outcomes. What were the attitudes of these kids toward other kids or toward certain social issues?" Despite the criticism, Shanker believes that if parents understood the idea of OBe, they would support it. "I think the majority of American parents and citizens would go along with the idea [that] we want to see what the outcomes are, but what they want would be the academic outcomes."
But Cheri Pierson Yecke, who was named 1988 Teacher of the Year in Stafford County, Va., links the continuing decline in test scores to "reforms" such as OBE. "Academic performance has fallen in many of the reform districts, in part because precious time is being diverted away from academics in order to socialize students," she says. "In 1983, 'A Nation at Risk' concluded that not enough time was being spent on academic courses. Were educators listening? Apparently not." Yecke spent nine years teaching and is now a doctoral candidate in educational psychology at the University of Virginia and a member of the Governor's Commission on Champion Schools.