Outcome-Based Education has become a focal point for critics of educational reform all across the country. But why? In order to understand and evaluate their criticisms, it is necessary to understand what Outcome-Based Education is and the difference between the principle and the practice of OBE.

At its most basic, OBE is simply the establishment of expected goals or outcomes for different levels of elementary-secondary education, and a commitment to ensuring that every student achieves at least those minimum proficiencies before being allowed to graduate.

This is eminently sensible, and some of you might believe schools already do this. For the most part, they do not.

Outcome-Based Education is fast becoming reality in nearly every state. It succeeds in doing so for three primary reasons:

1) Reform is Necessary.For more than a decade poll after poll has shown the American public's dissatisfaction with the public education system. This was especially brought to the forefront by the famous A Nation at Risk report during the Reagan Administration. National and international test scores are down, yet average grades assigned to students are up. Violence, substance abuse, and parenthood among teens are all up, but literacy is down. Even if we accept that there are more students taking college entrance exams like the SAT than would have considered college decades ago skewing averages down the most able students aren't scoring as high as in the past. Yet expenditures for education have risen far faster than inflation for more than 30 years.

Outcome-Based Education offers a means of reform.

2) Parents & Taxpayers feel out of control — out of the loop in decision-making for reform. It is clear that our public schools are not performing as well as most of us expect. Yet it is primarily the behavioral scientist architects and managers of this dysfunctional system, along with politicians and influential teachers' unions, who are in charge of creating a new and better system. Reform is imperative, but we have been reforming education — this time — for more than ten years. When the suggested reforms involve spending even less time on the foundation skills — that too many students already are not receiving — somebody isn't proposing the right reforms.

OBE offers the opportunity to set standards outside of the educational system.

3) There is no standard for measuring the success of students, teachers, or schools. There is a genuine need for setting standards that students must reach before they may receive a diploma. Although there is often a state or district mandate that students take so many years of a subject and earn this many hours or credits in order to graduate, there are few requirements regarding what specific skills make up each course. For example, what degree of skill should be expected of students who study a year of algebra? How much knowledge comprises a year of English? Presently, students from different schools, districts, and states can have very different answers to those questions. Furthermore, the failure of a student, classroom, school, or the entire school system, is the responsibility of the parents, taxpayers, society, drugs, poverty, or the entertainment industry . . . anything but the educational system itself. At least, this is the myth that the educational system perpetuates.

Outcome-Based Education offers a standard of measurement.

This sounds so simple and fundamental that it is not surprising that OBE quickly became popular . . . how could anyone be opposed to it? But . . . what OBE seems to be in theory is not necessarily what it has become in reality. Unfortunately, OBE still sounds so sensible . . . that only some kind of nut would oppose it. Critics, therefore, must be very clear that their opposition is not to the principle of OBE — in fact that the principle of establishing expected outcomes is not only acceptable, but is absolutely necessary. The objection to OBE lies in what it has become in practice.

We wholeheartedly endorse the principle of OBE, and the practice of adopting Outcomes that set quantifiable standards in academic skills and subjects whose accomplishment by students can be verified through objective testing.

We roundly condemn what OBE has become in practice — setting standards that are not academic in nature and cannot be verified through objective testing. Outcomes which are so soft and fuzzy that student understanding and proficiency cannot be verified are intolerable. How do you test a student's values and beliefs, and what, or whose values, set the standard? At best, these Outcomes distract from more important knowledge and skills. At worst, some of them intrude on the sanctity of vulnerable adolescent minds.

We do not have and desperately need schools based upon the first kind of Outcome; we cannot risk the future of our children, our nation, and our world on the second kind.

Critics must make clear their support for the principle of having expected learning outcomes, but their reservations or objections regarding the specific Outcomes that have so far been adopted.

What reforms are going to help our schools?

No single reform will suffice. Our educational system needs extensive revision. Here are some suggestions, however, for how to begin:

• Separate behavioral science experimentation from education.
• Laws such as the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment (PPRA) must be enforced and should even be broadened and strengthened. PPRA already prohibits psychological testing without express written consent of parents, but that did not prevent the widespread use of tests like the Educational Quality Assessment (EQA) that do just that. Protection must be extended to prohibit explicitly affective curricula as well.
• Uniform minimum standards for performance of objectively measurable skills which must be achieved early in students' school careers. Advanced standards for graduation should not be uniform, but broader and more flexible — yet they must still be objective standards. This is what OBE should be. Affective instruction has little or no place in schools.
• Renew schools' focus on their primary job. Public schools cannot be everything for everyone. Public schools' purpose is to provide students with a common core of fundamental knowledge and skills. During the past three decades too many additional responsibilities have been placed on schools from school lunches (now breakfasts, even during the summer) to sex education, coping with death, environmental awareness, AIDS awareness, global relationships, cultural sensitivity, and family violence sensitivity. Each of those, individually, may have merit, but collectively they take time and distort the focus of schools away from teaching skills that students will need to succeed in later their studies, employment, and personal lives after school.
• A decrease in nonteaching — particularly administrative — personnel. The massive growth of this portion of school employees has led to a decline in focus on classroom teachers. The proportion of elementary/secondary school resources that directly support classroom instruction is often distressingly small, especially in larger districts (Portland, Oregon - 36%; New York, New York - 22%). Indeed, when staffing reductions were announced here in Portland schools, 75% of the cuts were teaching positions. This is the sign of a system with severely misplaced priorities.
• Increased parental involvement in student performance in school. Too many parents treat schools as glorified daycare for children, and take little interest in a child's progress, much less serve as role models for standards of achievement and behavior. Schools, however, bear much responsibility for this state of affairs. Too often parents who do wish to be involved are discouraged by the inflexibility of bureaucratic public institutions and the arrogance and intransigence of school authorities.
• Downsize! Downsize! DOWNSIZE! This rallying cry of modern business should become part of the modern school. The number of elementary and secondary schools fell 69% between 1940 and 1990, from approximately 200,000 to just over 62,000. The number of school districts fell more than 87%, from 117,000 to fewer than 16,000. Coupled with the population increase during that period, average district enrollment increased by more than 1,100%, from 217 to 2,637. There is some evidence that increased district size, school size, and proportion of nonlocal funding are all significantly and negatively related to student achievement i.e. as school systems become more centralized, student achievement falls. Some New York City schools are finding renewed success by creating independent mini-schools within huge urban school buildings.
• Reverse the trend toward intolerance of independent thought. Teachers and principals cannot do their jobs effectively — will not want to do their jobs to the best of their abilities — if they are treated as second-class members of the education team. If schools have any faith at all in their ability to hire qualified personnel . . . for Goodness Sake stay out of their way and let them do their jobs! Teachers and principals are closer to students and can understand and deal with their needs much more effectively than people isolated in an administrative office somewhere. Just as businesses are learning, schools should not to have too many layers of management between their top management and their customers. Of course staff must be supervised, and there should be procedures for improving performance which does not measure up, including (as necessary) for terminating the employment of those who cannot improve. But until that time, and for all the other teachers and principals who are already capable and not in need of such measures . . . bureaucrats and administrators should not try to do their jobs for them!
• Regain the loss (perhaps abandonment is more accurate) of vision and purpose among educators. In expecting superintendents to have specific training and experience in management, finance, public relations, fundraising, etc., school systems have lost the sense of importance in hiring leaders of vision, with a willingness to take risks in order to find innovative solutions to complex problems for our schools and school systems. This is the most important common factor that studies identify among successful schools. Without genuine leaders, any organization has difficulty maintaining a sense of purpose. Our nation needs bold thinkers and innovators to lead our schools back to positions of success and admiration. The best leaders are not afraid to be wrong. There will, sometimes, be failures. Leaders should not be penalized for such failures. Better to learn from small failures than suffer catastrophic failures by experimenting with an entire nation of children at once.
• Apply knowledge of effective schools in every school. The knowledge we already have of what makes schools effective is rarely ever applied. When effective innovations are identified — whether originated locally or through some special project or grant — the knowledge too often stops there. Although programs such as the National Diffusion Network (NDN) were established to perform this function, useful information is not finding its way into enough schools. This might involve replicating successful programs from elsewhere. Sometimes it could mean returning to older methods which were discarded during some previous round of reform. This does not mean, however, irresponsible experimentation, such as employing unproven psychotherapeutic techniques in the hands of nonprofessionals. Parents must always be informed about experiments which depart significantly from the norm, and allow them to exempt their children from such experiments, if they wish. Indeed, some of the experimentation taking place could be quite appropriate if it were taking place on a limited basis with parental consent. But statewide or nationwide experimentation is clearly unacceptable.
• Embrace diversity. Children are not all alike. Teachers are not all alike. Schools need not should not be all alike. If the first concern of our public school systems is what is best for the children . . . then public schools should work with private schools and home schoolers to help ensure their success, not try to constrain and regulate them to be clones of the public schools. Family backgrounds and learning styles are can be very different even unique perhaps educational solutions should reflect some of that diversity.
• Regain the trust of parents. The support of parents is essential to the successful educational process. Schools must learn to fully inform parents, take their suggestions — and even criticisms — seriously and deal openly and honestly with them. Educators might know more about the way schools work, but they must also understand that most parents know more about their own children than teachers and administrators will ever have time to learn.

What OBE Is Not

Outcome-Based Education is not dangerous. It is not hateful, or immoral. OBE is not even unethical . . . in theory.

But like unnumerable previous ideas to reform or revolutionize education, OBE the theory has been twisted — by educationists and legislators — into something unrecognizable.

A parallel example lies with another much-criticized concept, Mastery Learning. (This should not be confused with Learning for Mastery, which is something else entirely.) Some of Benjamin Bloom's work might be open to criticism, but this is one concept that should be free of controversy.

Mastery Learning is basically a logical extension of OBE, but where OBE proposes to set standards that students must meet near the end of their secondary school careers, Mastery Learning simply requires that students demonstrate proficiency over individual topics on a weekly or even daily basis, before advancing.

But there are many people who will vigorously denounce Mastery Learning as immoral . . . because Mastery Learning the innovative tool was often used to teach equally novel subjects such as sex education and values clarification.

But Mastery Learning methods may be used to teach concepts as faddish and suspect as values clarification or as crucial as history or mathematics. In fact, reduced to its essentials, Mastery Learning methods bear much resemblance to John Saxon's popular (with everyone but mainstream educationists) and enormously effective mathematics texts: focus on a specific topic and don't proceed to the next one until students master it. Plenty of practice and review help to cement knowledge and proficiency.

There have been many worthwhile ideas that changed into something they were not intended to be once the educational bureaucracy redefined them. "Accountability," for example, became "blame the teachers for everything." And Individualized Instruction (which we developed, by the way), did not originally mean individual one-on-one tutoring for every child — or a decline of any kind in the student/teacher ratio or class size — and had none of the bureaucratic formality that devolved into Individual Education Plans (IEP).

Critics must separate their criticism of the content of instruction from the instructional methodology itself. Such teaching methods and tools — whether OBE or Mastery Learning or Individualized Instruction — are free of content. Many educators, legislators, media representatives, or simply other parents would be sympathetic to objections when they learn the specifics, but will dismiss critics of a sensible concept like OBE out of hand as being members of some lunatic fringe. However, if criticisms of content are presented carefully, many listeners — including experts and policymakers — would become immediately sympathetic . . . after all, only members of some lunatic fringe would invade the privacy of children and families in such a fashion as we see taking place in the name of reform today!