OBE HOSTILE TO RELIGION, MASTERY LEARNING SO BAD, CHANGED TO OBE,
ENHANCED OBE WOULD SWAP HI MATH FOR HI FEELINGS.
\doc\web\97\09\obecond.txt OBE is based on Skinner Conditioning,
Favored by UNESCO, Mastery Learning disaster in Chicago measured by
norm-referenced tests, Spady willing to negotiate "ehanced OBE" with
"hi math" instead of "high values" outomcs. Lighting rod for
Christian Conservatives is open hostility and stated goal to
eliminate religious values.  "Like Skinner, Dr. Spady sees "religious
orthodoxy," "fundamentalism," and "conservatism" as the great evils
in the world today"


From:             XcongressX@aol.com
Date sent:        Mon, 17 Nov 1997 13:21:56 -0500 (EST)
To:               fredb001@spectra.net, jimmyk@tenet.edu, conserv-exceledu@listproc.bgsu.edu,
        education-consumers@tricon.net
Subject:          Fwd: OBE: Conditioning for Control


Received originally August,1997 ..............


When key sociologisteducrats invite their opposition to dialogue over
so-called "educational controversies," you can be sure something is not quite
right. According to an article in the May 17, 1994 Denver Post, "some of the
most outspoken national opponents and proponents of outcome-based education
have already met informally in Denver to identify common concerns." The
article described a meeting involving Dr. William Spady, an education
consultant widely recognized as the high priest of outcome-based education
(OBE), the controversial philosophy that has stirred fierce battles in school
districts and state houses nationwide. The Post article continued:


Spady and members of his High Success Network consulting firm met earlier
this month in Denver with Bob Simonds, national president of Citizens for
Excellence in Education, a traditionalist Christian organization.


Also present were representatives of Focus on the Family, a national
religious group based in Colorado Springs, and the Independence Institute, a
conservative think tank from Golden.


No Compromise


According to the Post, "Spady says he's willing to talk about OBE 'choice,'
which would put stress on letting parents in their own communities decide on
the type of outcomes they want." Simonds is quoted as being "interested in
talking about 'enhanced OBE,' which is content-based --- strong on math,
science, English, but not concerned with 'attitudes, values."' Amy Stephens,
representing James Dobson's "Focus on the Family", wisely reserved judgement
on what, if any, steps could be taken to reconcile the positions held by the
two opposing sides.
	
Alarm hells should have gone off across the nation. There can be no
compromise on this issue. As outrageous as the outcomes are (to quote no less
an education "authority" than the late Albert Shanker, of the radio American
Federation of Teachers Union, in his widely circulated newspaper column,
"Outrageous Outcomes," of September 12, 1993), outcomes in the values domain
- which have been bad for as long as this author can recall - can always be
changed to suit the whims or expediencies of the moment. As indeed has
happened since Spady, Simonds, et al. arrived at a "compromise" of sorts on
OBE. What the social engineers will not allow to be compromised, however, is
the mastery learning/OBE method to which UNESCO and the U.S. Department of
Education have been commited for nearly 30 years. Education Secretaries
Terrel Bell, William Bennett, Lamar Alexander, and Richard Riley have all
supported OBE mastery learning with grants to develop and implement it
nationwide.
	
Why? Because the bottom line, as usual, is global profits and global control
for the globalists of the planned new world order. Because to those imbued
with the current collectivist/humanist behaviorist zeitgeist, there is no
more effective way to "train" workers than using mastery learning/programmed
learning, which is based on Russian psychologist Ivan Pavlov's animal
experimentation and the late Harvard Professor B.F. Skinner's behavior
modification techniques. That is, it is based on the operant conditioning.
stimulus-response techniques used in rat, dog, and pigeon training
laboratories:


"Sit, Fido, sit."; Fido sits - "Good dog, Fido." Pop a biscuit into Fido's
mouth and move on to the next skill. If Fido doesn't sit, he may be punished
with a shock before being recycled through the exercise again (and again)
until he exhibits the desired behavior.


"Stimulus, Response"
	
This is the kind of conditioning that is outlined in the OBE manual entitled
Effective Schooling Practices: A Research Synthesis, 1990 Update. Developed
and published by the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory in Portland,
Oregon, this document is in use in hundreds of schools. Under its section
entitled "Incentives and Rewards," Effective Schooling Practices states the
following:


		a.	Excellence is defined by objective standards, not by peer comparison.
Systems are set up in the classroom for frequent and consistent rewards to
students for academic achievement and excellent behavior.
		b.	Rewards are appropriate to the developmental level of students and may
include symbolic, token, tangible, or activity rewards.
		c.	All students know about the rewards and what they need to do to get
them. Rewards are chosen because they appeal to students....
		e.	Some rewards are presented publicly; some are immediately presented,
while others are delayed to teach persistence.
		f.	Students earn some rewards individually; others are earned by groups of
students, as in some cooperative learning structures.


	
To those unfamiliar with behaviorist psychology, the above excerpt may sound
innocuous. But to those acquainted with B F. Skinner's behaviorist
pseudo-science, the document is easily recognizable as a program for
conditioning students as if they were animals. Unfortunately, this document
is far from unique; hundreds of similar training manuals, teacher guides, and
curriculum frameworks, produced with federal and state tax dollars, have
flooded our schools.
	
What kind of human beings do the government schools wish to produce with
these programs? After 12 years of systematic "rewards" (and penalties), will
your children ever do something just because They consider it necessary,
good, or simply beautiful? Or will there be anyone left willing to take an
unpopular or controversial stand in opposition to the prevailing, politically
correct sentiment if no reward is forthcoming and punishment is certain? Such
training is highly suitable to training a docile workforce, but hardly
conducive to preparing children for responsible citizenship in a free
society.


The Computer Age
	
Ironically, the same modern computer technology that offers such wonderful
potential for genuine learning is being hijacked by the educational
behaviorists to subvert education. Dr. Skinner said, "I could make a pigeon a
high achiever by reinforcing it on a proper schedule." The computer, with its
built-in, immediate Skinnerian reinforcement, in conjunction with individual
education plans and management information systems (management by objectives,
or MBO), is the perfect tool for monitoring and reinforcing behavior "on a
proper schedule."
	
A major stumbling block to efficient implementation of Skinnerian-based
mastery learning/OBE programs in the past has been the practical problem of
expecting a single teacher/trainer effectively and continuously to monitor
and reinforce the behavior's of a classroom full of students. But computer
trends are solving that problem: Falling computer costs, together with
accelerating computer operational speeds and increasingly sophisticated
software, are making automated monitoring and reinforcement of individualized
instruction (read conditioning) a classroom reality. Hence the big push by
the education establishment to equip classrooms with computers for each child
-- even as the same classrooms turn out record numbers of illiterates.
	
For the utopian behaviorists, the computer is the indispensable instrument
for attitudinal adjustment and global workforce training. Thomas Sticht,
president of
Applied Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences, Inc. in San Diego, California and
a member of the U.S. Department of Labor's SCANS (Secretary's Commission on
Achieving Necessary Skills), referred to such training when he said in 1987:


Many companies have moved operations to places with cheap, relatively poorly
educated labor. What may be crucial, they say, is the dependability of a
labor force and how well it can be managed and trained not its general
educational level, although a small cadre of highly educated creative people
is essential to innovation and growth.


Of particular interest is the fact that Thomas Sticht and William Spady,
while working at the National Institute of Education, U.S. Department of
Education, in 1977, served as consultants to the Washington, DC public school
system when it implemented mastery learning. The August 1, 1977 Washington
Post quoted DC's Associate Superintendent of Schools James Guines as saying
that "the new curriculum was based on the work in behavioral psychology of
Harvard University's B.F. Skinner, who developed teaching machines and even
trained pigeons during World War II to pilot and detonate bombs and
torpedoes." The Washington, DC program has been an enormous disaster by every
academic, economic, and social measure.


Inner-City Washout
	
Instead of meeting with Bill Spady and Marjorie Ledell to discuss outrageous
outcomes, the conservatives opposed to OBE should have met with officials in
the U.S. Department of Education and demanded of them norm-referenced test
scores of children in the inner cities who have been subjected to this
dehumanizing, manipulative conditioning. "Education Week" reported on August
28, 1985 that Professor James Block, very influential in international and
national mastery learning circles, said "he did not know of any major urban
school system in the United States that had not adopted some kind of mastery
learning program.
	
At a 1983 mastery learning conference in Maine (which this writer attended),
Dr. S. Alan Cohen, associate director of the Center for Outcomes-Based
Education at the University of San Francisco, said: "In 1976 Block and Burns
published in AERA [American Educational Research Association research from

around the world on mastery learning. UNESCO committed to mastery learning
all over the world.... We have evaluated data worldwide."
	
If, as we are being told, mastery learning has been successful where
implemented, why has there been such a silence regarding the test scores of
inner-city children? The Chicago mastery learning program, which resulted in
almost one-half of 39.500 students in the 1980 freshman class failing to
graduate, was just the tip of the iceberg. The press coverage of the Chicago
mastery learning disaster was so devastating to the behaviorists' plans that
the media, which has been overwhelmingly supportive of OBE schemes, ceased
publicizing results from all the other major urban school systems that
adopted mastery learning.

	
In the meantime, the social engineers wisely changed the mastery learning
label to outcome-based education (OBE), which they now call "direct
instruction" to avoid the fallout associated with OBE's failures. Although
"accountability" is one of their pet buzzwords, the name changes are made
precisely to avoid being held accountable for their failed experiments. And
their experiments have been far from inconsequential. The summary of the
National Evaluation of the Follow Through Findings, 1970-1976, an extensive
survey of mastery-learning programs, states: 


'Gary McDaniels, who designed the final Follow Through evaluation plan for
the U.S. Office of Education, characterized Follow Through, which involves
180 cooperating communities, as the largest and most expensive social
experiment ever launched." (Emphasis added.)
	
That's pretty big. Yet, an examination of the Follow Through Findings on
programs which used mastery learning indicates that they did not improve
inner-city children's academic test scores. In fact, they had a devastatingly
negative impact. Additional proof of the failure of ML/OBE programs can be
found in the pro-OBE report Models of Instructional Organization; A Casebook
on Mastery Learning and Outcome-Based Education (April 1987), compiled by
Robert Burns, project director of the Far West Laboratory for Educational
Research and Development. The conclusion of the Casebook states, in part:
"The four models of instructional organization outlined in this casebook are
difficult programs to implement. The practices of the ten schools described
in the case studies are indeed commendable. Yet we do not offer these ten
case studies as exemplary schools deserving emulation." (Emphasis added.) And
for good reason: These "commendable" schools have been embarrassing debacles.


Missing the Main Point
	
Why then is the U.S. Department of Education recommending the use of
outcome-based education when its own research suggests that the most
well-known OBE mastery-learning direct instruction schools do not deserve
emulation? How many school board members, teachers, or parents are aware of
the research detailing the colossal failures of mastery learning? Had they
been informed about this years ago, OBE indoctrination would not have swept
the nation as it unfortunately has. And if parents understood the truly
insidious nature of OBE, they would make no compromises whatsoever with its
devious practitioners and promoters.
		
What most opponents of OBE have focused on are the "outrageous outcomes"
typical of so many OBE programs. For religious parents that usually means
those areas of the curriculum and testing in the "affective domain" that
challenge eternal verities, promote moral relativism, and advance the sexual
revolution (premarital and extra-marital sex, homosexuality, abortion, etc.)
while undermining parental authority, the family, and patriotism. They are
upset, and rightly so, by mandated outcomes like this one for Oklahoma
students in grades 9-12: "The student will develop communication skills,
including being able to talk with one's actual or potential partner about
sexual behavior." Others are equally troubled by the OBE "cognitive domain"
emphasis on group learning activities, non-graded dasses, and mushy, fuzzy
academic objectives (outcomes) at the expense of traditional subject matter
and basic reading. writing, and computing skills. This Pennsylvania OBE
outcome is typical: "All students will make environmentally sound decisions
in their personal and civic lives."
	
However, parents and conservative leaders who think they are winning a great
victory by getting OBE leaders like Spady and Ledell to "enhance" OBE and
remove objectionable outcomes will one day rue their naivete'.* The OBE
educrats will grudgingly concede to temporarily change the content - as long
as the process, the method, and the system are not affected.
	
Unfortunately, most OBE opponents see only the obviously objectionable
content and ignore the more subtly sinister Skinnerian process. Some are
aware that Dr. Skinner was a militant atheist humanist (a signer of the
Humanist Manifesto and a winner of the "Humanist of the Year" award) and that
he made some astonishingly totalitarian statements. What they don't seem to
realize is that his whole philosophy and epistemology, which undergird OBE,
are profoundly totalitarian in orientation and irredeemably hostile to
Christian morality and individual liberty.
	
The real desired outcome of the OBE elitists is a deliberately dumbed-down,
easily managed and controlled global workforce of compliant automatons. Any
compromise with these totalitarian mind controllers is a bargain with evil
and a sellout of our children's birthright of freedom. ####
=======================================
*	Like Skinner, Dr. Spady sees "religious orthodoxy," "fundamentalism," and
"conservatism" as the great evils in the world today. In his report for the
Department of Defense, Ensuring the Success of All Students Today for
Tomorrow's Changing World, Spady writes: "Despite the historical trend toward
intellectual enlightenment and cultural pluralism, there has heen a major
rise in religious and political orthodoxy, intolerance, fundamentalism. and
conservatism with which young people will have to he prepared to deal." Those
whom Spady views as representatives of "orthodoxy. intolerance,
fundamentalism, and conservatism" would do well to consider that the "olive
branch" being extended to them may conceal a dagger. ###


-- Charlotte T. Iserbyt
EDUCATION CONSUMERS CLEARINGHOUSE


From:             XcongressX@aol.com
Date sent:        Mon, 17 Nov 1997 13:21:56 -0500 (EST)
To:               fredb001@spectra.net, jimmyk@tenet.edu, conserv-exceledu@listproc.bgsu.edu,
        education-consumers@tricon.net
Subject:          Fwd: OBE: Conditioning for Control


Received originally August,1997 ..............


When key sociologisteducrats invite their opposition to dialogue over
so-called "educational controversies," you can be sure something is not quite
right. According to an article in the May 17, 1994 Denver Post, "some of the
most outspoken national opponents and proponents of outcome-based education
have already met informally in Denver to identify common concerns." The
article described a meeting involving Dr. William Spady, an education
consultant widely recognized as the high priest of outcome-based education
(OBE), the controversial philosophy that has stirred fierce battles in school
districts and state houses nationwide. The Post article continued:


Spady and members of his High Success Network consulting firm met earlier
this month in Denver with Bob Simonds, national president of Citizens for
Excellence in Education, a traditionalist Christian organization.


Also present were representatives of Focus on the Family, a national
religious group based in Colorado Springs, and the Independence Institute, a
conservative think tank from Golden.


No Compromise


According to the Post, "Spady says he's willing to talk about OBE 'choice,'
which would put stress on letting parents in their own communities decide on
the type of outcomes they want." Simonds is quoted as being "interested in
talking about 'enhanced OBE,' which is content-based --- strong on math,
science, English, but not concerned with 'attitudes, values."' Amy Stephens,
representing James Dobson's "Focus on the Family", wisely reserved judgement
on what, if any, steps could be taken to reconcile the positions held by the
two opposing sides.
	
Alarm hells should have gone off across the nation. There can be no
compromise on this issue. As outrageous as the outcomes are (to quote no less
an education "authority" than the late Albert Shanker, of the radio American
Federation of Teachers Union, in his widely circulated newspaper column,
"Outrageous Outcomes," of September 12, 1993), outcomes in the values domain
- which have been bad for as long as this author can recall - can always be
changed to suit the whims or expediencies of the moment. As indeed has
happened since Spady, Simonds, et al. arrived at a "compromise" of sorts on
OBE. What the social engineers will not allow to be compromised, however, is
the mastery learning/OBE method to which UNESCO and the U.S. Department of
Education have been commited for nearly 30 years. Education Secretaries
Terrel Bell, William Bennett, Lamar Alexander, and Richard Riley have all
supported OBE mastery learning with grants to develop and implement it
nationwide.
	
Why? Because the bottom line, as usual, is global profits and global control
for the globalists of the planned new world order. Because to those imbued
with the current collectivist/humanist behaviorist zeitgeist, there is no
more effective way to "train" workers than using mastery learning/programmed
learning, which is based on Russian psychologist Ivan Pavlov's animal
experimentation and the late Harvard Professor B.F. Skinner's behavior
modification techniques. That is, it is based on the operant conditioning.
stimulus-response techniques used in rat, dog, and pigeon training
laboratories:


"Sit, Fido, sit."; Fido sits - "Good dog, Fido." Pop a biscuit into Fido's
mouth and move on to the next skill. If Fido doesn't sit, he may be punished
with a shock before being recycled through the exercise again (and again)
until he exhibits the desired behavior.


"Stimulus, Response"
	
This is the kind of conditioning that is outlined in the OBE manual entitled
Effective Schooling Practices: A Research Synthesis, 1990 Update. Developed

and published by the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory in Portland,
Oregon, this document is in use in hundreds of schools. Under its section
entitled "Incentives and Rewards," Effective Schooling Practices states the
following:


		a.	Excellence is defined by objective standards, not by peer comparison.
Systems are set up in the classroom for frequent and consistent rewards to
students for academic achievement and excellent behavior.
		b.	Rewards are appropriate to the developmental level of students and may
include symbolic, token, tangible, or activity rewards.
		c.	All students know about the rewards and what they need to do to get
them. Rewards are chosen because they appeal to students....
		e.	Some rewards are presented publicly; some are immediately presented,
while others are delayed to teach persistence.
		f.	Students earn some rewards individually; others are earned by groups of
students, as in some cooperative learning structures.


	
To those unfamiliar with behaviorist psychology, the above excerpt may sound
innocuous. But to those acquainted with B F. Skinner's behaviorist
pseudo-science, the document is easily recognizable as a program for
conditioning students as if they were animals. Unfortunately, this document
is far from unique; hundreds of similar training manuals, teacher guides, and
curriculum frameworks, produced with federal and state tax dollars, have
flooded our schools.
	
What kind of human beings do the government schools wish to produce with
these programs? After 12 years of systematic "rewards" (and penalties), will
your children ever do something just because They consider it necessary,
good, or simply beautiful? Or will there be anyone left willing to take an
unpopular or controversial stand in opposition to the prevailing, politically
correct sentiment if no reward is forthcoming and punishment is certain? Such
training is highly suitable to training a docile workforce, but hardly
conducive to preparing children for responsible citizenship in a free
society.


The Computer Age
	
Ironically, the same modern computer technology that offers such wonderful
potential for genuine learning is being hijacked by the educational
behaviorists to subvert education. Dr. Skinner said, "I could make a pigeon a
high achiever by reinforcing it on a proper schedule." The computer, with its
built-in, immediate Skinnerian reinforcement, in conjunction with individual
education plans and management information systems (management by objectives,
or MBO), is the perfect tool for monitoring and reinforcing behavior "on a
proper schedule."
	
A major stumbling block to efficient implementation of Skinnerian-based
mastery learning/OBE programs in the past has been the practical problem of
expecting a single teacher/trainer effectively and continuously to monitor
and reinforce the behavior's of a classroom full of students. But computer
trends are solving that problem: Falling computer costs, together with
accelerating computer operational speeds and increasingly sophisticated
software, are making automated monitoring and reinforcement of individualized
instruction (read conditioning) a classroom reality. Hence the big push by
the education establishment to equip classrooms with computers for each child
-- even as the same classrooms turn out record numbers of illiterates.
	
For the utopian behaviorists, the computer is the indispensable instrument
for attitudinal adjustment and global workforce training. Thomas Sticht,
president of
Applied Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences, Inc. in San Diego, California and
a member of the U.S. Department of Labor's SCANS (Secretary's Commission on
Achieving Necessary Skills), referred to such training when he said in 1987:


Many companies have moved operations to places with cheap, relatively poorly
educated labor. What may be crucial, they say, is the dependability of a
labor force and how well it can be managed and trained not its general
educational level, although a small cadre of highly educated creative people
is essential to innovation and growth.


Of particular interest is the fact that Thomas Sticht and William Spady,
while working at the National Institute of Education, U.S. Department of
Education, in 1977, served as consultants to the Washington, DC public school
system when it implemented mastery learning. The August 1, 1977 Washington
Post quoted DC's Associate Superintendent of Schools James Guines as saying
that "the new curriculum was based on the work in behavioral psychology of
Harvard University's B.F. Skinner, who developed teaching machines and even
trained pigeons during World War II to pilot and detonate bombs and
torpedoes." The Washington, DC program has been an enormous disaster by every
academic, economic, and social measure.


Inner-City Washout
	
Instead of meeting with Bill Spady and Marjorie Ledell to discuss outrageous
outcomes, the conservatives opposed to OBE should have met with officials in
the U.S. Department of Education and demanded of them norm-referenced test
scores of children in the inner cities who have been subjected to this
dehumanizing, manipulative conditioning. "Education Week" reported on August
28, 1985 that Professor James Block, very influential in international and
national mastery learning circles, said "he did not know of any major urban
school system in the United States that had not adopted some kind of mastery
learning program.
	
At a 1983 mastery learning conference in Maine (which this writer attended),
Dr. S. Alan Cohen, associate director of the Center for Outcomes-Based
Education at the University of San Francisco, said: "In 1976 Block and Burns
published in AERA [American Educational Research Association research from
around the world on mastery learning. UNESCO committed to mastery learning
all over the world.... We have evaluated data worldwide."
	
If, as we are being told, mastery learning has been successful where
implemented, why has there been such a silence regarding the test scores of
inner-city children? The Chicago mastery learning program, which resulted in
almost one-half of 39.500 students in the 1980 freshman class failing to
graduate, was just the tip of the iceberg. The press coverage of the Chicago
mastery learning disaster was so devastating to the behaviorists' plans that
the media, which has been overwhelmingly supportive of OBE schemes, ceased
publicizing results from all the other major urban school systems that
adopted mastery learning.
	
In the meantime, the social engineers wisely changed the mastery learning
label to outcome-based education (OBE), which they now call "direct
instruction" to avoid the fallout associated with OBE's failures. Although
"accountability" is one of their pet buzzwords, the name changes are made
precisely to avoid being held accountable for their failed experiments. And
their experiments have been far from inconsequential. The summary of the
National Evaluation of the Follow Through Findings, 1970-1976, an extensive
survey of mastery-learning programs, states: 


'Gary McDaniels, who designed the final Follow Through evaluation plan for
the U.S. Office of Education, characterized Follow Through, which involves
180 cooperating communities, as the largest and most expensive social
experiment ever launched." (Emphasis added.)
	
That's pretty big. Yet, an examination of the Follow Through Findings on
programs which used mastery learning indicates that they did not improve
inner-city children's academic test scores. In fact, they had a devastatingly
negative impact. Additional proof of the failure of ML/OBE programs can be
found in the pro-OBE report Models of Instructional Organization; A Casebook
on Mastery Learning and Outcome-Based Education (April 1987), compiled by
Robert Burns, project director of the Far West Laboratory for Educational
Research and Development. The conclusion of the Casebook states, in part:
"The four models of instructional organization outlined in this casebook are
difficult programs to implement. The practices of the ten schools described
in the case studies are indeed commendable. Yet we do not offer these ten
case studies as exemplary schools deserving emulation." (Emphasis added.) And
for good reason: These "commendable" schools have been embarrassing debacles.


Missing the Main Point
	
Why then is the U.S. Department of Education recommending the use of
outcome-based education when its own research suggests that the most
well-known OBE mastery-learning direct instruction schools do not deserve
emulation? How many school board members, teachers, or parents are aware of
the research detailing the colossal failures of mastery learning? Had they
been informed about this years ago, OBE indoctrination would not have swept
the nation as it unfortunately has. And if parents understood the truly
insidious nature of OBE, they would make no compromises whatsoever with its
devious practitioners and promoters.
		
What most opponents of OBE have focused on are the "outrageous outcomes"
typical of so many OBE programs. For religious parents that usually means
those areas of the curriculum and testing in the "affective domain" that
challenge eternal verities, promote moral relativism, and advance the sexual
revolution (premarital and extra-marital sex, homosexuality, abortion, etc.)
while undermining parental authority, the family, and patriotism. They are
upset, and rightly so, by mandated outcomes like this one for Oklahoma
students in grades 9-12: "The student will develop communication skills,
including being able to talk with one's actual or potential partner about
sexual behavior." Others are equally troubled by the OBE "cognitive domain"
emphasis on group learning activities, non-graded dasses, and mushy, fuzzy
academic objectives (outcomes) at the expense of traditional subject matter
and basic reading. writing, and computing skills. This Pennsylvania OBE
outcome is typical: "All students will make environmentally sound decisions
in their personal and civic lives."
	
However, parents and conservative leaders who think they are winning a great
victory by getting OBE leaders like Spady and Ledell to "enhance" OBE and
remove objectionable outcomes will one day rue their naivete'.* The OBE
educrats will grudgingly concede to temporarily change the content - as long
as the process, the method, and the system are not affected.
	
Unfortunately, most OBE opponents see only the obviously objectionable
content and ignore the more subtly sinister Skinnerian process. Some are
aware that Dr. Skinner was a militant atheist humanist (a signer of the
Humanist Manifesto and a winner of the "Humanist of the Year" award) and that
he made some astonishingly totalitarian statements. What they don't seem to
realize is that his whole philosophy and epistemology, which undergird OBE,
are profoundly totalitarian in orientation and irredeemably hostile to
Christian morality and individual liberty.
	
The real desired outcome of the OBE elitists is a deliberately dumbed-down,
easily managed and controlled global workforce of compliant automatons. Any
compromise with these totalitarian mind controllers is a bargain with evil
and a sellout of our children's birthright of freedom. ####
=======================================
*	Like Skinner, Dr. Spady sees "religious orthodoxy," "fundamentalism," and
"conservatism" as the great evils in the world today. In his report for the
Department of Defense, Ensuring the Success of All Students Today for
Tomorrow's Changing World, Spady writes: "Despite the historical trend toward
intellectual enlightenment and cultural pluralism, there has heen a major
rise in religious and political orthodoxy, intolerance, fundamentalism. and
conservatism with which young people will have to he prepared to deal." Those
whom Spady views as representatives of "orthodoxy. intolerance,
fundamentalism, and conservatism" would do well to consider that the "olive
branch" being extended to them may conceal a dagger. ###


-- Charlotte T. Iserbyt
EDUCATION CONSUMERS CLEARINGHOUSE




From:             XcongressX@aol.com
Date sent:        Mon, 17 Nov 1997 13:21:56 -0500 (EST)
To:               fredb001@spectra.net, jimmyk@tenet.edu, conserv-exceledu@listproc.bgsu.edu,
        education-consumers@tricon.net
Subject:          Fwd: OBE: Conditioning for Control


Received originally August,1997 ..............


When key sociologisteducrats invite their opposition to dialogue over
so-called "educational controversies," you can be sure something is not quite
right. According to an article in the May 17, 1994 Denver Post, "some of the
most outspoken national opponents and proponents of outcome-based education
have already met informally in Denver to identify common concerns." The
article described a meeting involving Dr. William Spady, an education
consultant widely recognized as the high priest of outcome-based education
(OBE), the controversial philosophy that has stirred fierce battles in school
districts and state houses nationwide. The Post article continued:


Spady and members of his High Success Network consulting firm met earlier
this month in Denver with Bob Simonds, national president of Citizens for
Excellence in Education, a traditionalist Christian organization.


Also present were representatives of Focus on the Family, a national
religious group based in Colorado Springs, and the Independence Institute, a
conservative think tank from Golden.


No Compromise


According to the Post, "Spady says he's willing to talk about OBE 'choice,'
which would put stress on letting parents in their own communities decide on
the type of outcomes they want." Simonds is quoted as being "interested in
talking about 'enhanced OBE,' which is content-based --- strong on math,
science, English, but not concerned with 'attitudes, values."' Amy Stephens,
representing James Dobson's "Focus on the Family", wisely reserved judgement
on what, if any, steps could be taken to reconcile the positions held by the
two opposing sides.
	
Alarm hells should have gone off across the nation. There can be no
compromise on this issue. As outrageous as the outcomes are (to quote no less
an education "authority" than the late Albert Shanker, of the radio American
Federation of Teachers Union, in his widely circulated newspaper column,
"Outrageous Outcomes," of September 12, 1993), outcomes in the values domain
- which have been bad for as long as this author can recall - can always be
changed to suit the whims or expediencies of the moment. As indeed has
happened since Spady, Simonds, et al. arrived at a "compromise" of sorts on
OBE. What the social engineers will not allow to be compromised, however, is
the mastery learning/OBE method to which UNESCO and the U.S. Department of
Education have been commited for nearly 30 years. Education Secretaries
Terrel Bell, William Bennett, Lamar Alexander, and Richard Riley have all
supported OBE mastery learning with grants to develop and implement it
nationwide.
	
Why? Because the bottom line, as usual, is global profits and global control
for the globalists of the planned new world order. Because to those imbued
with the current collectivist/humanist behaviorist zeitgeist, there is no
more effective way to "train" workers than using mastery learning/programmed
learning, which is based on Russian psychologist Ivan Pavlov's animal
experimentation and the late Harvard Professor B.F. Skinner's behavior
modification techniques. That is, it is based on the operant conditioning.
stimulus-response techniques used in rat, dog, and pigeon training
laboratories:


"Sit, Fido, sit."; Fido sits - "Good dog, Fido." Pop a biscuit into Fido's
mouth and move on to the next skill. If Fido doesn't sit, he may be punished
with a shock before being recycled through the exercise again (and again)
until he exhibits the desired behavior.


"Stimulus, Response"
	
This is the kind of conditioning that is outlined in the OBE manual entitled
Effective Schooling Practices: A Research Synthesis, 1990 Update. Developed
and published by the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory in Portland,
Oregon, this document is in use in hundreds of schools. Under its section
entitled "Incentives and Rewards," Effective Schooling Practices states the
following:


		a.	Excellence is defined by objective standards, not by peer comparison.
Systems are set up in the classroom for frequent and consistent rewards to
students for academic achievement and excellent behavior.
		b.	Rewards are appropriate to the developmental level of students and may
include symbolic, token, tangible, or activity rewards.
		c.	All students know about the rewards and what they need to do to get
them. Rewards are chosen because they appeal to students....
		e.	Some rewards are presented publicly; some are immediately presented,
while others are delayed to teach persistence.
		f.	Students earn some rewards individually; others are earned by groups of
students, as in some cooperative learning structures.


	
To those unfamiliar with behaviorist psychology, the above excerpt may sound
innocuous. But to those acquainted with B F. Skinner's behaviorist
pseudo-science, the document is easily recognizable as a program for
conditioning students as if they were animals. Unfortunately, this document
is far from unique; hundreds of similar training manuals, teacher guides, and
curriculum frameworks, produced with federal and state tax dollars, have
flooded our schools.
	
What kind of human beings do the government schools wish to produce with
these programs? After 12 years of systematic "rewards" (and penalties), will
your children ever do something just because They consider it necessary,
good, or simply beautiful? Or will there be anyone left willing to take an
unpopular or controversial stand in opposition to the prevailing, politically
correct sentiment if no reward is forthcoming and punishment is certain? Such
training is highly suitable to training a docile workforce, but hardly
conducive to preparing children for responsible citizenship in a free
society.


The Computer Age
	
Ironically, the same modern computer technology that offers such wonderful
potential for genuine learning is being hijacked by the educational
behaviorists to subvert education. Dr. Skinner said, "I could make a pigeon a
high achiever by reinforcing it on a proper schedule." The computer, with its
built-in, immediate Skinnerian reinforcement, in conjunction with individual
education plans and management information systems (management by objectives,
or MBO), is the perfect tool for monitoring and reinforcing behavior "on a
proper schedule."
	
A major stumbling block to efficient implementation of Skinnerian-based
mastery learning/OBE programs in the past has been the practical problem of
expecting a single teacher/trainer effectively and continuously to monitor
and reinforce the behavior's of a classroom full of students. But computer
trends are solving that problem: Falling computer costs, together with
accelerating computer operational speeds and increasingly sophisticated
software, are making automated monitoring and reinforcement of individualized
instruction (read conditioning) a classroom reality. Hence the big push by
the education establishment to equip classrooms with computers for each child
-- even as the same classrooms turn out record numbers of illiterates.
	
For the utopian behaviorists, the computer is the indispensable instrument
for attitudinal adjustment and global workforce training. Thomas Sticht,
president of
Applied Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences, Inc. in San Diego, California and
a member of the U.S. Department of Labor's SCANS (Secretary's Commission on
Achieving Necessary Skills), referred to such training when he said in 1987:


Many companies have moved operations to places with cheap, relatively poorly
educated labor. What may be crucial, they say, is the dependability of a
labor force and how well it can be managed and trained not its general
educational level, although a small cadre of highly educated creative people
is essential to innovation and growth.



Of particular interest is the fact that Thomas Sticht and William Spady,
while working at the National Institute of Education, U.S. Department of
Education, in 1977, served as consultants to the Washington, DC public school
system when it implemented mastery learning. The August 1, 1977 Washington
Post quoted DC's Associate Superintendent of Schools James Guines as saying
that "the new curriculum was based on the work in behavioral psychology of
Harvard University's B.F. Skinner, who developed teaching machines and even
trained pigeons during World War II to pilot and detonate bombs and
torpedoes." The Washington, DC program has been an enormous disaster by every
academic, economic, and social measure.


Inner-City Washout
	
Instead of meeting with Bill Spady and Marjorie Ledell to discuss outrageous
outcomes, the conservatives opposed to OBE should have met with officials in
the U.S. Department of Education and demanded of them norm-referenced test
scores of children in the inner cities who have been subjected to this
dehumanizing, manipulative conditioning. "Education Week" reported on August
28, 1985 that Professor James Block, very influential in international and
national mastery learning circles, said "he did not know of any major urban
school system in the United States that had not adopted some kind of mastery
learning program.
	
At a 1983 mastery learning conference in Maine (which this writer attended),
Dr. S. Alan Cohen, associate director of the Center for Outcomes-Based
Education at the University of San Francisco, said: "In 1976 Block and Burns
published in AERA [American Educational Research Association research from
around the world on mastery learning. UNESCO committed to mastery learning
all over the world.... We have evaluated data worldwide."
	
If, as we are being told, mastery learning has been successful where
implemented, why has there been such a silence regarding the test scores of
inner-city children? The Chicago mastery learning program, which resulted in
almost one-half of 39.500 students in the 1980 freshman class failing to
graduate, was just the tip of the iceberg. The press coverage of the Chicago
mastery learning disaster was so devastating to the behaviorists' plans that
the media, which has been overwhelmingly supportive of OBE schemes, ceased
publicizing results from all the other major urban school systems that
adopted mastery learning.
	
In the meantime, the social engineers wisely changed the mastery learning
label to outcome-based education (OBE), which they now call "direct
instruction" to avoid the fallout associated with OBE's failures. Although
"accountability" is one of their pet buzzwords, the name changes are made
precisely to avoid being held accountable for their failed experiments. And
their experiments have been far from inconsequential. The summary of the
National Evaluation of the Follow Through Findings, 1970-1976, an extensive
survey of mastery-learning programs, states: 


'Gary McDaniels, who designed the final Follow Through evaluation plan for
the U.S. Office of Education, characterized Follow Through, which involves
180 cooperating communities, as the largest and most expensive social
experiment ever launched." (Emphasis added.)
	
That's pretty big. Yet, an examination of the Follow Through Findings on
programs which used mastery learning indicates that they did not improve
inner-city children's academic test scores. In fact, they had a devastatingly
negative impact. Additional proof of the failure of ML/OBE programs can be
found in the pro-OBE report Models of Instructional Organization; A Casebook
on Mastery Learning and Outcome-Based Education (April 1987), compiled by
Robert Burns, project director of the Far West Laboratory for Educational
Research and Development. The conclusion of the Casebook states, in part:
"The four models of instructional organization outlined in this casebook are
difficult programs to implement. The practices of the ten schools described
in the case studies are indeed commendable. Yet we do not offer these ten
case studies as exemplary schools deserving emulation." (Emphasis added.) And
for good reason: These "commendable" schools have been embarrassing debacles.


Missing the Main Point
	
Why then is the U.S. Department of Education recommending the use of
outcome-based education when its own research suggests that the most
well-known OBE mastery-learning direct instruction schools do not deserve
emulation? How many school board members, teachers, or parents are aware of
the research detailing the colossal failures of mastery learning? Had they
been informed about this years ago, OBE indoctrination would not have swept
the nation as it unfortunately has. And if parents understood the truly
insidious nature of OBE, they would make no compromises whatsoever with its
devious practitioners and promoters.
		
What most opponents of OBE have focused on are the "outrageous outcomes"
typical of so many OBE programs. For religious parents that usually means
those areas of the curriculum and testing in the "affective domain" that
challenge eternal verities, promote moral relativism, and advance the sexual
revolution (premarital and extra-marital sex, homosexuality, abortion, etc.)
while undermining parental authority, the family, and patriotism. They are
upset, and rightly so, by mandated outcomes like this one for Oklahoma
students in grades 9-12: "The student will develop communication skills,
including being able to talk with one's actual or potential partner about
sexual behavior." Others are equally troubled by the OBE "cognitive domain"
emphasis on group learning activities, non-graded dasses, and mushy, fuzzy
academic objectives (outcomes) at the expense of traditional subject matter
and basic reading. writing, and computing skills. This Pennsylvania OBE
outcome is typical: "All students will make environmentally sound decisions
in their personal and civic lives."
	
However, parents and conservative leaders who think they are winning a great
victory by getting OBE leaders like Spady and Ledell to "enhance" OBE and
remove objectionable outcomes will one day rue their naivete'.* The OBE
educrats will grudgingly concede to temporarily change the content - as long
as the process, the method, and the system are not affected.
	
Unfortunately, most OBE opponents see only the obviously objectionable
content and ignore the more subtly sinister Skinnerian process. Some are
aware that Dr. Skinner was a militant atheist humanist (a signer of the
Humanist Manifesto and a winner of the "Humanist of the Year" award) and that
he made some astonishingly totalitarian statements. What they don't seem to
realize is that his whole philosophy and epistemology, which undergird OBE,
are profoundly totalitarian in orientation and irredeemably hostile to
Christian morality and individual liberty.
	
The real desired outcome of the OBE elitists is a deliberately dumbed-down,
easily managed and controlled global workforce of compliant automatons. Any
compromise with these totalitarian mind controllers is a bargain with evil
and a sellout of our children's birthright of freedom. ####
=======================================
* Like Skinner, Dr. Spady sees "religious orthodoxy,"
"fundamentalism," and "conservatism" as the great evils in the world
today. In his report for the Department of Defense, Ensuring the
Success of All Students Today for Tomorrow's Changing World, Spady
writes: "Despite the historical trend toward intellectual
enlightenment and cultural pluralism, there has heen a major rise in
religious and political orthodoxy, intolerance, fundamentalism. and
conservatism with which young people will have to he prepared to
deal." Those whom Spady views as representatives of "orthodoxy.
intolerance, fundamentalism, and conservatism" would do well to
consider that the "olive branch" being extended to them may conceal a
dagger. ###


-- Charlotte T. Iserbyt
EDUCATION CONSUMERS CLEARINGHOUSE