Multicultural Express Rumbles Into Chesterfield

Wednesday, March 24, 1993

By Robert Holland 

"This is fake reform -- PC junk --that profits no one except curriculum consultants peddling their wares to gullible educrats." 

Computation is a basic skill, as is phonics.  In the Brave New World Order of education restructuring, such old-fashioned basics rank way below politically correct attitudes, multiculturalism, and pupil self-esteem on the priority scale. 

Still, one simple two-step calculation is entirely in order for the so-called Outcome Based Education that Virginia's Department of Education is so determined to spread across the Commonwealth:

(1) How much is this massive makeover going to cost?

(2) What return can taxpayers expect on their, ahem, "investment"? 

Extrapolating figures from a Wharton School of Economics study in Pennsylvania, the Virginia Taxpayers Association last week estimated that OBE could increase education costs across the state as much as $500 million.  Is that figure off?  Would the actual cost of teacher retraining, new textbooks, new tests, etc., be less than other education projects?   Or is the stage being set for a tax increase of Clintonesque proportions? 

Mum's the word from DOE.  Before the state goes one step further with OBE, a.k.a. World-Class Education, its leaders should have to talk cost, honestly. 

As for return on the dollar, the shocking truth is that OBE -- which is largely about inculcating the kinds of attitudes that infest National Education Association conclaves -- is entirely experimental.  There are no data to show that it advances learning.  There is, in fact, evidence to the contrary.  In Chicago, for instance, black parents sued educrats for malpractice, charging that OBE had turned their elementary school into a "factory of failure."  The district school board later dropped OBE after confirmation that test scores had plunged. 

Meanwhile, Virginia educrats -- with compatriots in 30 other states -- are working up a full head of steam despite their claims that everything's in draft form and nothing's final.  Yesterday DOE held the latest in a series of public TV workshops on OBE -- this one on, uh-huh, "Overcoming Barriers to School Restructuring."  And it has distributed $1.5 million for early childhood (ages 4-8) "demonstration schools" in Danville, Roanoke, Albemarle, Gloucester, Virginia Beach, Norfolk, Prince Edward, Winchester, Wise, Prince William, Stafford, and Hanover. 

Chesterfield County is one of the school systems rushing to embrace the attitudinal approach ahead of the state's timetable.  That's hard to figure, given the excellence the county's schools have achieved by stressing the basics.  A radically revised K-12 social studies curriculum, scheduled to begin a phase-in this fall, typifies the new paradigm:  

"We have designed this program," the curriculum committee proudly stated, "to enhance students' self-worth and their appreciation of a diverse and ever-changing world."  The approach is "interdisciplinary" and "multicultural."  Social studies used to be about basic history, geography, civics.  Now, it's all about "global citizenship." 

A 3-inch-thick manual lays out the New Social Studies in exquisite detail. Here is a small sampling of suggested activities: 

*Fourth-graders studying "the first Americans" will be invited to make a mask and create a dance to participate in an Aztec religious ceremony (sans human sacrifice one presumes) -- this, ironically, in a school system that recently banned voluntary baccalaureate services.  Evidently religion is hunky-dory if it is "multicultural." *Fifth-graders will study the Americas of the 20th Century by focusing on three persons:  Cesar Chavez, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Colin Powell.  So goes the Maya Angelou Grand Diversity Parade:  a Hispanic, a woman, a black. White males like Teddy Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Dwight Eisenhower are mere bystanders compared with such towering figures as a union boycotter of grapes and lettuce.  Students will research various labor unions, including those for boilermakers, electrical workers, firefighters, mine workers...and teachers. 

*In high school, each student will be compelled to perform 20 hours of community service annually. The teacher will decide what constitutes service.  Projects with the homeless or tree-huggers are among the possibilities.  Somehow I doubt that volunteering to help Concerned Educators Against Forced Unionism would cut it. 

* In studying ancient Greece, ninth-graders could "write a newspaper article with the headline, "Gloria Steinem Addresses Women's Group in Sparta." 

The issue is not the status quo vs reform.  It is real reform vs. fake reform, education vs. political indoctrination.  This is fake reform --PC junk -- that profits no one except curriculum consultants peddling their wares to gullible educrats. 

What works?  The November, 1991, issue of The Atlantic Monthly examined the relatively few schools that did not -- repeat not -- experience the 80-point plunge in SAT verbal scores that occurred in education generally from 1963 to 1980.  The study showed that those consistently high-quality schools had these stands in common: 

*They never abandoned a traditional liberal-arts curriculum to chase Sixties' fads like "relevance."  They continued to stress English grammar and vocabulary, as well as rigorous math. 

*They also continued to group students by ability in as many disciplines as possible.  The contrast here could not have been more vivid:  Schools that insisted (as OBE doctrine does) on classes of widely divergent abilities had the sharpest achievement drops.  Those that maintained the homogeneous grouping -- thus tending to the needs of gifted and slower students alike -- kept performance high. 

OBE is a train wreck happening in slow motion.  Must there really be another crack up, and billions more wasted, before the bitter lesson is learned again?