Following several years of popularity, outcome-based education (OBE) is facing lean times, participants at a session on the future of OBE were told.
"We've gone backwards in the past three years," said Bill Spady, director of the High Success Network and a leading proponent of OBE. Several states have dropped their support for OBE programs, and fewer schools and districts are willing to launch OBE programs. Although OBE is an effort to restructure schools around some very positive principles, OBE opponents have labeled it a threat to academic excellence, Spady said. "Today, rumor and distortion define outcome-based education."
Spady described several different "faces" of OBE, saying that the "program alignment" model has the brightest future. This model emphasizes the alignment of curriculum, assessment, and instruction with traditional student outcomes. This is a far cry from the "transformational" OBE model Spady has long fought for. One model asks how to improve social studies by tighter alignment; the other asks, "Why do we even have social studies?"
Even the alignment model has its critics. Gretchen Schwartz, an assistant professor at Oklahoma State University, said OBE's obsession with "pre-ordained measurable outcomes" ignores aspects of learning that stem from human interactions. Even the language used in OBE philosophy—instructional delivery systems, designing down, and so on—is the stuff of "behaviorist social engineers," Schwartz charged.
Al Mamary, architect of the oft-cited Johnson City, N.Y., OBE plan, said that educators elsewhere had "messed up a good idea." If OBE proponents want greater acceptance, they should throw out any graduation requirements that are values-driven, continue to evaluate and grade how well students perform, and not propose evaluating students on the basis of how they feel. "Concentrate, number one, on academics," Mamary said. "Focus on all students' learning at high-quality levels."
