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A"Dear Colleague" Letter From Congressman Dick Armey
Do you ever get calls from angry parents complaining about "outcome-based education" (OBE)? Are you tempted to dismiss them as crazed right-wing kooks? Don’t. OBE is real. It's bad. And it produces angry parents. Just ask parents in 49 states (all but New Jersey) where OBE has been tried in one form or another. Ask the Johns Hopkins researchers who found it a flat failure. Ask American Federation of Teachers president Al Shanker, no right-wing loon, who calls OBE "outrageous." Better yet, ask Virginia Gov. Doug Wilder, who was forced to repeal it amid a withering parental backlash. Now imagine that parental backlash against Congress. That's right, Goals 2000 takes OBE national. Just what is OBE? Boil away all the rhetoric about "world class standards," etc., and it's simply the behaviorist teachings of B. F. Skinner applied to education. Developed in the early 1960s, it is the pigeons-pecking-for-pellets model of schooling. Children must perform a task over and over until they produce the required "outcome." OBE shifts a school’s focus from how much students know (cognitive outcomes) to how well they’re socialized (affective outcomes). It holds smart children back to the pace of the slowest learners. It weans children from their parents' values to instill in them politically correct secular-left values. And it always has two results: cheated children and angry parents. The Goals 2000 campaign is consciously patterned on state OBE efforts. First, the education establishment convinces politicians they need to appoint a panel of unaccountable experts to devise a system of "outcomes," "standards," "curricular frameworks " and "assessments" based on "goals" (Goals 2000 does all of this, via a new national school board called NESIC.) Next, schools are prodded or forced to adopt this system, with no more than token parental input (Goals 2000 ties federal reform dollars to states' "voluntary" adoption of the scheme.) Soon, children are taking tests with open-ended questions like"Three things I don't like about my parents are ... " Any wonder why it angers? Our colleague, Rep. Unsoeld, is urging Members to "ignore the ridiculous rhetoric about the presumed horrors of 'outcome-based education' and vote yes on Goals 2000" (H.R. l804). Well, if you want those angry phone calls multiplied by 100, go right ahead, vote for OBE. But my advice is play it safe: vote for the Parent and Student EmpowermentAct (the Armey-Ballenger-Boehner-Hoekstra substitute to Goals 2000). Respectfully,
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