The Trashing and Survival of OBE

By William G. Spady

America has all but abandoned outcomes-based education--and with it the growing impetus for a genuine paradigm shift in educational practice.

For more than three years, conservative critics of progressive public school reforms have carried out an intense attack against anyone or anything purported to be "outcomes based." This offensive has been fueled by the constant repetition of inaccurate and inflammatory information, both about authentic outcomes-based education and a host of things that have little or nothing to do with it. The term "OBE" has taken on a life of its own and become the rallying slogan and the automatic justification for attacks on anything nontraditional.

As a result of this intense and highly effective opposition, a climate of intimidation prevails in many states and communities. Emerging attempts to expand America's educational vision beyond the 1893 curriculum structure of the Committee of 10 and the thinking and organizational patterns of the Industrial Age have been abandoned wholesale. Numerous future-focused state and local reform policies have been challenged and reversed. Once-frequent state and national OBE conferences and workshops are no longer held. Sound, badly needed state and local public school reform and restructuring efforts have been abolished. And many forward-looking state and local educators have lost their jobs. Those that...