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OBE sneaks in through back door May 11, 1997 If the Ohio Department of Education office in Columbus has a front door, it's a safe bet that no employee uses it. The people who make education policy for Ohio's kids clearly prefer the back door. And if one back door is locked, they're willing to look until they find one that's ajar. Anything to avoid the front. Four years after failing to sneak outcome-based education past the legislature, the department is trying again. Those of you who have kept up with your score-cards know that OBE has gone by several names since the last time the department went jiggling out-of-the-way doorknobs on its behalf, back in 1993. Performance-based education sounded vaguely like progress and stuck for a while. Several decades ago, when this idea failed utterly the first time, it was called mastery learning. For the 1997 model year, the Same Old Thing has been rolled out as competency-based standards. Anyone who has followed OBE knows that, like other diseases, it is identifiable by certain symptoms. The onset of full-blown OBE is recognizable by the abolition of the Carnegie unit - the measuring stick educators long have used to decide when enough of a subject is enough. For example, should we require high school students to take two years of math - two Carnegie units - or three? Right now, Ohio requires high school students to complete 18 Carnegie units - including three years of English, two years of social studies and math and one year of science. In the competency-based incarnation of OBE that the Ohio State Board of Education will vote on tomorrow, the Carnegie unit disappears. It would be replaced by a system requiring that at some point before they are handed a diploma, students must show that they are "competent" in 10 subject areas - English, math, social studies, science, foreign language, art, technology, business, family and consumer sciences and health/physical education. And what, you may ask, do the deep thinkers at the Department of Education mean by "competent"? Maybe they'll get back to us on that; at the moment they have no idea. Neither does the department's wholly-owned subsidiary, the State Board of Education, which almost certainly will approve the competency-based model. The governor's office doesn't know what "competent" means, either. (And you can read that any way you like.) But the education governor's education aide, Thomas Needles, nonetheless was quoted in this newspaper on Thursday saying the competency-based standards are very, very, important to Ohio's future. "They represent one of the most critical pieces in our overall reform standards," Needles said. He showed a keen political sense in avoid the phrase "whatever they are." Funny, though. You'd think that if these standards were so terribly important someone would have actually set them in time for the State Board of Education to know what it was approving. No matter, though. After carefully donning their blindfolds, enough members of the board will say "yea" and send Department of Education minions scurrying for the General Assembly's service entrance. And there, Ohioans have a right to hope, this charade will end as it did in 1993. That's when the educrats tried to insinuate OBE into the state budget, of all places, but got caught. Going to the legislature this time with an education plan that has to stand on its own must seem to the educrats like a modern version of Pickett's charge. But it isn't. It's still an effort to legislate through the back door. Until the department and the state board can say precisely what they mean by "competency," the legislature cannot possibly judge the likelihood that this scheme will be in any way effective. Legislators are at least somewhat less likely than the State Board of Education to approve what is essentially an empty box on the promise that it will be perfectly packed later by consultants and bureaucrats. Ohio has a set of proficiency tests in math, English, science and social studies that are now driving the entire curriculum of the vast majority of the state's public schools. Maybe those tests define a satisfactory level of eighth-grade competency; probably they don't. (they certainly don't demand or test the breadth of knowledge that a high school diploma ought to represent.) But at least the subjects are academic in nature. In a competency-based system, would we really deny a high-school diploma to a math whiz who fails to master art or physical education? Or how about a youngster whose skill at art is unsurpassed but who is found wanting in family and consumer sciences? The Department of Education clearly is not going to give up on its
crusade for outcome-based education, so our best hope is that legislators keep a wary eye
on the back door. Last time, they demonstrated competency in that regard, but constituents
would be wise to review the subject with them. |
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