Opinion
What is Outcomes Based Education?
By
Jul 7, 2008, 07:11

            Outcomes-based education is the latest cure-all for K-12 education though its origins may be traced to the progressivist doctrine that has dominated schools of education (and hence public schools) for nearly a century.  OBE tacitly assumes that all students (or virtually all students) can learn up to a particular standard; that teaching needs to be artfully conducted in light of the naturally-unfolding psychological development of the child, and not according to some rational system of building-blocks of knowledge and skill; that “tradition” is the enemy of both creativity and wholeness—hence age-old methods of instruction are automatically suspect;  that students learn best when they are treated as members of a group rather than individuals; that exceptional achievement is, at best, a distraction from the task of advancing the group as a whole (at worst, it is an impediment to be suppressed);  and that learning should be contextualized to put knowledge in the context of social problems deemed relevant by the educrats. 

                OBE is a poisonous stew of ideas and was created in large part to stall other kinds of K-12 reform. 

                Surely there is some kind of connection between OBE and learning outcomes assessment of the sort favored by the U.S. Department of Education and the accreditors.  The accrediting associations picked up their infatuation with outcomes assessment from the TQM fad of the 1980s.  It fits extraordinarily well with what might be called accreditor relativism, i.e.  the idea that colleges should be judged on how well they accomplish their missions, no matter what the mission is, rather than on how well they educate anybody.  TQM is likewise an idolatry of mission.  It was created as a factory floor technique of minimizing the number of defective products at the end of the assembly line.  Its inventor, W. Edwards Deming, eventually got a case of grandiosity and imagined his technique could apply to other aspect of business as well.  TQM didn’t naturally fit the work of sales forces, legal departments, or creative engineers, but no matter.  American business mindlessly latched onto it for nearly a decade.  Education, always the last to know, joined the TQM parade just as American business was quietly forgetting all about it. 

                Part of the appeal to both business and education accreditors is that “outcomes assessment” promises to make quantifiable and controllable activities that cannot be quantified.  Outcomes assessment appeals to the still, small bureaucrat in our souls.  If we can just measure everything, we can command everything.  Or if we can’t measure everything, let’s concentrate on what we can measure, and surely the immeasurable pieces will fall in line. 

                Taking a broader view, OBE and outcomes assessment both descend from that strain in American thought that we usually call pragmatism.  “Judge us solely by the consequences of what we do,” is the creed of the pragmatist, and it thrills something in the American soul.  To be judged by outcomes alone means that we can escape (momentarily) the sterner questions of motive and meaning.  Those are part of the American soul too and won’t long be denied, but we go round and round on this.  To be judged just by the consequences of what we do soon turns into an attitude that measurable consequences are the only ones, and everything else is expediency. 

                OBE and outcomes assessment are both species of the larger expediency doctrine.  Both fail because expediency is never expedient.  It has to turn elsewhere for someone to supply a motive, a rationale, or a reason.  So OBE leads back to political correctness and disdain for classical education, and outcomes assessment leads back to bean-counting illiberalism.