CLUES THAT KATY ISD HAS AN OUTCOME BASED EDUCATION CURRICULUM:
There were two indications for me as a School Board member in the 1990's that said, "Katy ISD has OBE." Even though the School Board in 1994 had told the superintendent (Hugh Hayes)that we did not want OBE and then hired a superintendent (Leonard Merrell) who played dumb about OBE, but who had just finished a three hour college course on "Quality Management of OBE," with a certificate that no one bothered to show ME, it was obvious to me that people had been hired and trained and were being promoted to positions of importance and allowed to implement OBE ideas. Every school board workshop, state convention or national convention was steeped in communistic ideas and professors leading "workshops." One could not get away from it. Believe me--I tried to tell the others what was happening, and Ken Burton and Stanley Thompson got it, but the others were just dense or part of it.
This essay was attached to a newsletter that was sent to parents of Katy Elementary students by the Assistant Principal, David Laird. This essay is straight out of the OBE playbook.
What Do Kids Really Need to Know?
Measuring knowledge is a tricky business. What is really worth learning and how can students best demonstrate that they have learned ideas and skills that will help them be successful in the future?
Students will be asked to acquire learning that is transferable. This type of learning will be relevant to a variety of jobs and situations in life. Rote memorization will be de-emphasized and the ability to think analytically and to problem solve will be prized. The ability to work cooperatively with others will be an essential skill for almost all occupations. Some children possess this skill intuitively, but most are more successful when cooperative techniques are taught and modeled.
Authentic assessment requires that students, parents, and teachers all participate in determining the best "road map" for helping individual students learn. Portfolios of student work will be used to determine growth. Students will conference [sic] with teachers to set personal goals for learning and agree upon acceptable standards. Portfolios will not simply be collections of miscellaneous student work but will reflect student learning. Time must be devoted to two-way communication between teachers and students as they plan, adjust to learning needs, and examine progress. Children are not just spectators while the teachers lecture. Rather they are actively involved in their learning.
This type of learning will require a different type of thinking. Standardized tests will still be used to measure certain areas, but they are not a measure of the true learning that takes pace. Parents, students, and educators will need to learn and understand new methods of determining student progress which can not be measured by true/false or multiple choice tests.
What is really worth learning? Will different methods be worth the effort? Many educators are working to answer these questions. It seems that a system that empowers students and teachers to set goals, chart progress, and discuss the quality of individual student learning deserves a closer look. What an exciting opportunity for children to be participants in planning their own education!
David Laird
Assistant Principal
Katy Elementary School
I got four copies of this letter from Mr. Laird that went home with Katy Elementary students! Parents were not happy, and Mr. Laird didn't last long in KISD. If nothing else, he was not very smart to put out the agenda in such a clear way when the schools were trying to hide what they were doing!
The second item that was a dead giveaway was an Op Ed piece by Terri Majors, an assistant principal at Sundown Elementary School. The opinion piece appeared in the Houston Post on Sunday, July 18, 1993. The title was "Nothing New or Evil About Outcome-Based Education."
In the article, Ms. Majors responded to an earlier article about Outcome Based Education that she didn't seem to like particularly. She took exception to the ten reasons that had been given to "avoid Outcome-Based Education" and created ten reasons of her own "why these changes are good..."
Ms. Majors went on to cite Bill Spady, whose ideas are deflated elsewhere on this web site. She pointed to Benjamin Bloom's much discredited Learning for Mastery as "research" to support OBE's "effectiveness."
She pumped Jim Block, John Champlin, Robert Glaser, Marl Clay [maybe Marie Clay the developer of Reading Recovery the much discredited method of helping poor readers?], Donald Graves, Nancy Atwell, Marie Carbo, Kenneth Goodman, Jean King and Karen Evans.
Majors endorsed since discredited ideas such as the use of "whole language" to teach reading, developing self-esteem for everyone, eliminating time restrictions, using criterion-referenced assessments (citing the TAAS exam as an example of that), using portfolios to "measure growth," and utilizing increased staff development for teachers (so they too can be brainwashed), all ideas that I have pointed out elsewhere as OBE ideas that don't have relevance and don't work.
Finally, she described government as a "quality inspection organization"!
I knew then we were hosed.
I need to point out that Ms. Majors was and is not alone in her endorsement of these ideas. What I have come to appreciate since this article first appeared twenty years ago is that most teachers and administrators have no idea that what they are perpetuating is not good. They have just done what they learned in schools of education or staff development sessions. I can forgive them somewhat if they beg ignorance., but they should have known better. Having been a teacher, I also know how difficult it is to speak up against the system. One can lose a job that way!
And yes, I DID support Terri Majors when she ran for the School Board a few years ago. As I came to know her, I saw that she is honest, cares about students and their teachers, and was unjustly maligned by the current superintendent, Alton Frailey when she questioned his inability to act on clear information that there was and is a problem at Golbow Elementary for its teachers and students. She did not deserve to be treated as she was by our pompous superintendent.