VIRGINIA IMPORTING SCHOOL AGENDA

Wednesday, May 19, 1993

By Robert Holland 

In something of a valediction, Secretary of Education James Dyke last week assured employees of the State Department of Education that the devil theory favored by their bureaucratic brain trust really is true:  All the opposition to Outcome-Based-Education, a/k/a/ World Class Education, is attributable to an Op/Ed columnist who is distorting the program, out of some malign motive, possibly "political." 

And then, as if to say "nothing personal," Dyke called me up to say that he favored solid academics, not the gushy self-esteem glop, and that "we don't need some guru from California to come tell us what to do." 

Fine.  Then why do we need one from Colorado? 

In his anxiety to assuage the education establishment's OBE blues before resigning office soon, Dyke perhaps forgot that I had filed a Freedom of Information request with Superintendent of Public Instruction "Joe Spagnolo for some facts about OBE costs and implementation.  Spagnolo's response arrived in a big box (no ribbon) the day before Dyke gave his pep talk at DOE. 

One of the most telling FOI documents details the use of national consultants to help put together the so-called Common Core of Learning (CCL).  And despite having been modestly listed as just one of 57 consultants in a document DOE distributed publicly, William Spady of the High Success Network of Eagle, Colorado, clearly has been the star of the show. 

Virginia's DOE paid the High Success Network $2,000 a day to dispense Spady's wisdom at a two-day conclave in Oklahoma City last June 9-10.  And then on June 19, DOE shelled Spady another $2,000 honorarium, plus travel expenses, to come to Richmond for a day to exclaim further the joys of OBE (A DOE bureaucrat bragged about a bargain.  It seems the Fairfax County public schools had paid Spady $2,500 a day.) 

"Dr. Spady was selected to work with the Common Core of Learning Team as [sic] he is a leader in Transformational Outcome-Based Education, one of three design models being implemented across the nation in the area of Outcome-Based Education,"  DOE officials said in a document explaining why competitive bidding was not used to award him a contract. 

That's true.  Spady has his lucrative High Success Network perking in more than 30 states and several Canadian provinces, which explains why the attitudinal "outcomes" he favors for education are repeated almost verbatim from one state's "common core" to another's.   

With Spady, a sociologist and former director of the federally funded Far West Laboratory for Educational Research and Development, comes a definite (one-)world view of global resource maldistribution.  His program for molding "correct" attitudes in the young is a linear successor to the behavioral modification tactics of a radical Harvard psychologist, the late B. F. Skinner, author of Beyond Freedom and Dignity. 

Spady has not been Virginia's only OBE import.  This spring, DOE has paraded what it describes as national experts in OBE from such places as the University of Florida, the University of Wisconsin, Cornell, and UCLA to work out standards undergirding the "outcomes" and to develop an alternative system of pupil assessment (basically "no one fails").  For example, a Wisconsin professor was contracted to work on the CCL through August 1993 at a rate of $4000 a day, or a maximum of $4,000. 

National consultants are part of what will be a large OBE tab.  Yet Dyke had the gall to tell DOE staffers, "We are not asking the taxpayers for more money to pay for World Class Education, nor are we seeking to establish another layer of bureaucracy."  Ah, but they soon will be. 

Spagnolo claimed not to have a cost estimate for the two-year budget proposal that will go to the General Assembly next year.  But some pricey items are showing up on his staffers' wish-lists already -- for example, $7.3 million for a Virginia Center for Staff Development to retrain local educators, and $41 million for a strategic plan for using computer technology to support OBE restructuring. 

Furthermore, millions are being spent on implementation prior to formal approval of the much-revised CCL by the State Board of Education -- for example, $860,000 for retraining teachers principals, and administrators: $1.5 million for new tests; and $2.5 million for "transformational projects" around the state. 

Dyke claims that editorial criticism has distorted the World Class Initiative by referring to the original draft of last October.  The latest of innumerable rewrites -- the April 15 version --is much better, he says. 

Granted, some of the thickest jargon has been weeded, along with the most egregious examples of OBE in action, such as a study unit on homelessness for 8-year-olds.  However, the new document merely camouflages more than it shows.  The FOIA documents show OBE experts being paid into fall 1993 to flesh out the outcomes.   And those continue to be largely "affective" -- concerned, that is, with feelings. 

This remains a Bill Spade/High Success production.  And maybe there is a California guru as well. 

A DOE insider has sent me papers from a February 22 DOE training session led by Sue Miller Hurst, director of the Starshine Foundation (Del Mar, California) which is described as "an international organization dedicated to maximizing human capacity."  Together with Peter Senge of Massachusetts (yet another consultant, who was paid $9,000 for one day of preparation and one of presentation), Ms. Hurst directs a project designed to transform education by "children helping children."  She has worked with OBE restructuring at the early childhood level in Virginia. 

My informant says my FOIA request only gives a "small glimpse" of what restructuring is costing Virginia taxpayers because it asked only about the CCL and testing, not about all the outsiders being brought in to retrain school people.  As for Ms. Hurst, he/she said, "None of us has figured out what her message is yet." 

It must be a powerful one to justify its price tag.  Spagnolo tells me that DOE pays Ms. Hurst $1,641 a day, plus travel expenses (usually from California) for her and her husband, who acts as her assistant, and that she has a contract not to exceed 60 days.  So far, DOE has paid Ms. Hurst $24,974 for 15 days of consulting, and has shelled out another $10,772 for the couple's travel.  Potentially, then, this one consultant alone could pull down almost $100,000 in honoraria. 

Wouldn't classroom teachers love to see money like that?