Robber of Motivation

Master Teachers Expose Fallacies of OBE ‘Mastery’ Learning

Wednesday, August 11, 1993

By Robert Holland

Children ought to be allowed to take a test over and over and over again – as many times as they need or want – until they all have mastered the same standard?  Failure should be banished from the school vocabulary?  Competition should be scrapped in favor of group collaboration on socially “relevant” projects?

Don’t take the word of an ancient education writer as to how unproductive are those warmed-over progressivist dogmas of the Outcome-Based Education theorists.  From among the hundreds of concerned parents and teachers I have talked to over the past six months, let me introduce you today to three who have personal insights..

*First, meet Cheri Pierson Yecke, 1988’s Teacher of the Year in Stafford County and in 1991 a finalist for the Agnes Meyer Outstanding Teacher Award given by The Washington Post.  Ms. Yecke, a teacher of English and history, is in an unusually strong position to comment on OBE’s practical effects:  Her two daughters have become case studies (albeit not by the family’s choosing) in before-and-after OBE experimentation.

In August, 1991, the Yeckes moved back to Minnesota (Ms. Yeckes’ native state) and enrolled their children in District 833’s schools.  They did so without hesitation because they had lived in Cottage Grove from 1982 to 1984 and found the schools to be fine.  Unknown to them, however, the district had been implementing OBE during the seven years they had been away.  To their astonishment, they soon discovered that their daughters – by now in high school and junior high – had progressed academically while in Stafford “light years” ahead of their peers in Minnesota.

Younger daughter Tiffany, who had always loved school, was “in a matter of days begging to stay home. “ Why?  The work was far too easy,” said Cheri Yecke, who taught at a Wisconsin school just over the border, “but what was worse was that any display of intelligence was ridiculed in a cruel and demeaning way by many of the other students.  Hard work and self-discipline are looked down upon, and status is often achieved by non-performance.

“The prevailing attitude among many students is, ‘Why study?  They can’t fail me, so who cares?’ What sort of work ethic is this producing in these children?  No one fails, regardless of how little they do.  Instead, they receive ‘Incompletes,’ which can be made up at any time.

“The kids have the system figured out.  When there is a football game or show on TV the night before a test, a common comment is:  ‘Why study?  I’ll just take the test and fail it.  I can always take the retest later.”

Indeed, “Incomplete” appears to be the grade of choice, the successor to the Gentleman’s C of my generation.  At semester’s end in January, 1992, more than 15,500 Incompletes were recorded in District 833’s grades 7-12 – or about half of all grades awarded!

When young persons never have to meet deadlines, Ms. Yecke observes, they do not learn the consequences of sloth or irresponsibility.  They lack motivation.  They do not learn how to deal with life’s inevitable failures.

With her husband retiring from the Marine Corps, Cheri Yecke is this month moving her family back to Stafford County.  But she returns to find Virginia on the edge of the same OBE pit she just left.

Almost exactly the same, it would appear.  In an interview last winter with Educational Leadership magazine, Colorado-based OBE guru Bill Spady identified Virginia and Minnesota, along with Pennsylvania, as the national pacesetters for his “transformational” OBE, the most radical brand.  In Spady’s words, traditional academic subjects, such as English and history, must give way to students’ grasping “significant spheres of successful living” as defined by futurists.

*Next, meet the 1990 Teacher of the Year in populous Fairfax County, Vern Williams, who shares Ms. Yecke’s grave concerns about the OBE ideologues’ insistence on killing all grouping of students according to ability.  Williams is  particularly worried about the impact of that dogma on mathematics, which he has taught in Fairfax for 20 years.

Williams says that throwing a large number of pupils of widely divergent abilities into one math class guarantees a mixture of (1) “very bored” and (2) “very frustrated” pupils.

“We have been told recently that low ability students will gain just by being exposed to higher level concepts.  We are told that they probably will not learn many of the concepts, but that’s okay because they will still be better off.  Well, we do more than expose our students to concepts.  We teach!  Putting students of all abilities together in seventh grade math will force us to abandon any serious teaching.”

*Finally, meet Retha Danvers, who home-schools her children in Richmond.  Ms. Danvers breaks a stereotype in at least two ways:  A former university teacher of composition and rhetoric, she is a political liberal, and her reasons for home-schooling have nothing to do with religion.

Recently, she gently chided me for setting up a then-and-now dichotomy between what public education is now, and what horrors will befall it under OBE.  “In actual implementation,” she said, “ ‘then is ‘now’ – in other words, your description of what the system may become is chillingly similar to what it already is.  To me, close reading of OBE reveals not reform, but a justification of the same ol’ same ol.”

Rethan Danvers, I cheerfully concede you half a point.  Too much pablum already is being served up.  But OBE would deplete the academic menu even further, while filling it with what Spady terms “the affective and attitudinal dimensions of learning.”  Furthermore,  Cheri Yecke’s Stafford to Minnesota move suggests that Virginia is not yet as far along in academic deconstruction as some areas.

I am gladdened by the thought that liberals and conservatives might join forces in Virginia to reject OBE, and build stronger schools upon the foundation that is in place.