The War in Our Schools

As the daffodils of  ’95 bloomed, I was putting the finishing touches on a book, Not With My Child, You Don’t, which I am going to publish through a small company set up expressly for that purpose. Given that those who oppose nationalized education have had to fight their battles mostly underground, it seems only fitting to bring out the book in counter-cultural fashion.

I am a former PTA officer, my wife has taught in and my children have attended public schools, and my main job at the Richmond Times-Dispatch is to edit a daily op-ed page. I also write a weekly column mostly in my spare time. About the most exciting thing I have ever done in my life is to coach Little League baseball, unless you count running marathons (until my knees blew out). I am a Southerner. We are a polite breed—at least until provoked.

This is hardly the vita of a revolutionary. Yet hundreds of people from all parts of the country have called me the past two years to ask my advice on how to halt the monolithic OBE (Outcome-Based Education) movement—an effort of the education/industrial complex to transform schooling radically according to engineered “outcomes”— many of them based on Skinnerian behavior modification. A simple booklet of three dozen of my columns on OBE circulates briskly in the underground, with about 20,000 copies sold, and many more photocopied, faxed, and otherwise handed around. To my amazement, I often find myself a topic of discussion under “Reform” on the education bulletin board of Prodigy, an online interactive service. I also receive more invitations to speak around the nation than I can accept.

This is notoriety I did not seek. Yet I believe my angry words—my outrage—are fully justified by what is happening. Day after day, the anguished telephone calls come to my office, not from kooks but from worried parents: “They are asking my children some strange and very personal questions. . . . They don’t correct the students’ misspellings. . . . They have wiped out the honors course in Western Civilization. . . . They are requiring children to perform community service. . . . They are promoting the notion that the school is the children’s family. . . . They are junking grades, Carnegie units, textbooks, class rankings.”

I am outraged that a stealth takeover of education is proceeding rapidly under the bogus banner of “high standards for all,” with the objective of forcing all children to learn according to a nationally prescribed model. And as a career newspaperman, I am particularly outraged that the news media have allowed this juggernaut to advance with only the lightest of scrutiny. Why should citizens in Seattle or Dallas or New York or Tampa or (I swear) Honolulu be calling me—a Richmond editor—about what’s going on in schools in their own neighborhoods? Only because of the gross abdication of responsibility by the major media.

Let’s back up a few years: Not until December, 1992, had I ever heard of the term “Outcome-Based Education.” And my first source of information was not a professional journalist but a home-schooling parent. She called to advise me that the World Class Education Initiative that Virginia educrats had been plugging in vague press releases for two years was based on something called transformational OBE. She said this was a grotesque scheme thick with a political agenda, and she urged me to look into it for my weekly column. I did. She was right.

Liberally quoting Labor Department manifestoes, the state’s “Common Core of Learning” implied that providing employers with well-socialized, group-thinking workers for a global economy was somehow the highest goal of education. Industrial utilitarianism blended weirdly with the jargon of Progressive Education. Social relevance had become the highest goal of education. The structure of well-defined disciplines and deadlines for children to finish their work were derogated as the mindless accumulation of “seat time.” In place of traditional graduation requirements would come “outcomes” related to the necessities of performing certain “life roles.” Every single thing done in and by a school “should depend upon what attitudes, knowledge and skill it takes each student to accomplish those outcomes.”

What outcomes, then, did the state’s social engineers deem critical for the lives of schoolchildren? Well, strangely enough the outcomes propounded for Virginia’s grassroots exercise in school reform proved to be similar—if not word-for-word identical—to those being generated in other states. Students were to become Collaborative Workers, Environmental Stewards, Lifelong Learners, Global Citizens, and the like. Out at the University of Wisconsin, Dr. Jeffrey M. Jones (an accomplished physician, teacher, researcher, and author of the impressive monograph, “The Outcome-Based Education Movement”) found these, and other, “essential learner outcomes” common among area school districts:

•Quality producer

•Collaborative worker

•Complex thinker

•Community contributor

•Global citizen

Looking beyond Wisconsin to Syracuse, New York, he discovered such outcomes as these:

•Quality producers and performers

•Collaborative contributors

•Creative, complex, and perceptive thinkers

And so it has gone around the country as citizens have compared notes and found that educrats were dispensing new paradigms from the same barrel of stale and squishy nostrums. Did the educrats think school patrons were too stupid to notice the education world’s mindless copycatting? In Connecticut, an alert citizens’ group matched this outcome in their state’s “Common Core of Learning”—”Each student should be able to appreciate his or her worth as a unique and capable individual and exhibit self-esteem”— with the following outcome in Pennsylvania’s OBE plan— “All students will understand their worth as unique and capable individuals and exhibit self-esteem.” (Whatever happened to the goal of keeping one’s foolish pride in check?) Kansans and Oklahomans had a treat when they compared outcomes. Kansas: “Students think creatively and problem-solve in order to live, learn, and work in a global society.” Oklahoma: “Students think creatively and problem solve in order to live, learn, and work in the 21st century.” Yes, a lot of creative thinking went into these outcomes.

One reason for the mass plagiarism is that states have been buying canned OBE programs right off a consultant’s shelf. One of the most successful OBE marketeers has been William Spady, a sociologist, who plies the education trade from his High Success Network in Eagle, Colorado. From one of my Freedom of Information filings, I found that Virginia’s Department of Education had paid Spady consulting fees of $2,000 a day. But there is more to the OBE movement than the education bureaucrats’ addiction to expensive fads.

A powerful collaboration of interests has joined to push “systemic change,” which turns out (no matter how much some of the players may deny the label) to be the OBE brand. In the summer of 1994, the collaborators—irked by resistance from mere parents across the country—formed a coalition to counter the anti-OBE underground. Coalitionists were promised “message tool kits, including sample speeches, model presentations, issue briefs, material on opponents, and an advocacy video.” Among the coalitionists were the Business Roundtable (its chief bankroller), the National Alliance of Business, Council of Chief State School Officers, National Association of State Boards of Education, National Association of Secondary School Principals, and the National Education Association. At the federal level, the Department of Education—through its National Diffusion Network—has trumpeted the vanguard OBE school system of Johnson City, New York, even though results of the state’s Regents’ testing in 1994 showed Johnson City lagging in pupil achievement even in comparison with the 12 districts in its own region. Its schools were dead last in third-grade reading.

Not surprisingly, OBE proponents want to scuttle norm-referenced testing in favor of subjective (and expensive) portfolio assessments. That way, they can claim whatever level of success for their reforms they wish—as indeed the educationists already have done in the key OBE state of Kentucky. Who can disagree since all basis of valid comparison across time and between school districts and pupils will have been obliterated? The three key pieces of federal systemic change legislation passed in 1994—Goals 2000, School to Work, and the five-year reauthorization of the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act—all call for performance standards based on this kind of “authentic” assessment.

Indeed, to assess Outcomes that probe personal outlook and world views, such as those cited above, subjectivity is a must. The idea of assessing students according to their responses to open-ended questions and collections of their work (portfolios)—as opposed to their grasp of objectively verifiable knowledge—is the driving force behind the whole systemic change. Indeed, as Dr. Jeff Jones observes, OBE is a philosophy in which “the tail (assessment) wags the dog (the educational enterprise).” The New Standards Project, a spin-off of the National Center on Education and the Economy, itself a Carnegie Foundation spin-off, is developing the assessments that are to drive a national curriculum. Instead of course-ending tests that “sort out” students according to achievement, the NSP contemplates assessments that will result in uniformly “high” attainment.

Efforts are underway in the new Republican Congress to strip out of Goals 2000 the National Education Standards and Improvement Council (NESIC) which would certify the new OBE standards for states. But even if NESIC falls, the proponents of systemic restructuring will have other ways to enforce their will—for instance, through the National Education Goals Panel, or the National Skill Standards Board, two more freshly minted bureaucracies. Unless, that is, congressional leaders muster the courage simply to get the federal government out of the education business altogether, which it is presently in without constitutional justification.

Given that these radical changes would affect every school in America, all the stranger are the media’s silence and willingness to let gross manipulation of communication outlets to go unchallenged. When news accounts appear, they typically just pass along the party line. And when evidence surfaces of a massive government campaign to use the media as tools of systemic restructuring, mediacrats just yawn. Late in 1994, for example, the National Education Goals Panel put together a Community Action Tool Kit chock-full of goodies to propagandize the glories of OBE/Goals 2000 in every community. Contained in the kit were many government-prepared materials that strike at the heart of media integrity: canned letters to the editor, and even op-ed pieces and feature stories needing only a signature: Government-issue grassroots support. The Kit also offers detailed advice for steering the outcomes of public meetings toward a government-approved “consensus.” That’s the job of government-trained facilitators. Yet despite the Orwellian overtones of all this, there has been little comment in the media, other than a few of my own outbursts and a fine article by Candace de Russy in this magazine. I may have missed some articles but certainly there has been no outcry such as there would have been had, say, the Defense Department published a kit to mold pro-military attitudes among the public

With regard to the Big Media, there may be at least two reasons for its silence in the face of the elitist drive to reshape public attitudes to accept nationalized education: 1) The media mavens share the philosophical leanings of the government manipulators, and (2) the media elite is falling ever more in love with the conceited notion that it, too, has a calling to steer outcomes of public issues in politically correct ways. New York writer Stephanie Gutmann, looking at the new journalists coming out of the schools of mass communications, decided they have much in common with education’s OBEists. “Like schools of social work and schools of education” she wrote in National Review, “schools of journalism transplant rarefied, elitist, city-folk concerns like multicultural education and condoms for six-year-olds to the heartland. The daily newspaper, once a simple voice—a neighbor talking to neighbors—becomes a hectoring superego, the voice of the cultural elite.”

One of the questions my callers most frequently ask is what they can do to coax a little news coverage of the OBE movement’s impact on their own community. Well, probably the worst thing they can do is to whine constantly about “media bias.” The smarter course is to accept it as a given and then find ways to counter it. In Kentucky, when Donna Shedd found the state’s largest newspaper, the Louisville Courier-Journal, to be ignoring the OBE story, she sent articles to all 22 of the state’s smaller papers. Soon stories started appearing in the community papers, and she received long distance phone calls from editors and readers thanking her. She got the word out, and eventually the Courier-Journal called her, asking for information for a story on, OBE and the Kentucky Education Reform Act. Donna is one of the activists from a dozen key states who have contributed their personal experiences to my book.

Other activists have made good use of talk radio to break the media silence. And still others essentially have created their own media using the fax, modem, and desktop to circulate newsletters across the land. You can get more information about education reform from them than you can find in the pages of the good gray New York Times. It’s going to take a long time, but I swear I think the rag-tag underground army is going to win. I know that their efforts have inspired me. I consider them, not the government-backed facilitators and change agents, the real heroes of education reform.

Author

  • Robert Holland

    Robert Holland is a Senior Fellow in Education at the Heartland Institute.

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