The Blumenfeld education Letter April_1993

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The BlumenfeldEducation LetterVo l. 8 , No .4 ( le tte r # 80)

"My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge," HOSEA4:6A pril 1 99 3ED ITOR : S amuel L B lumenfe ld

Thepurpose of this newsletter isto provide knowledge for parents and educators who want to save the children of Americafrom the destructive forces that endanger them. Our children in the public schools are at grave risk in 4 ways: academically,

spiritually, morally, and physically - and only a well"informed public will be able to reduce these risks."Without vision, the people perish."

aBE and M astery Learningor

Educational R evolution by StealthNowthat theeducationist planners havedecided that the traditional educational

model is ineffective and obsolete and.cannotmeet the demands of the future, they arebusily paving over the last 150 years ofeducational experience with a new conceptfor thegovernment schools:Outcome-BasedEducation (OBE).

According to William G. Spady, chiefwizard behind OBE,the idea for this revolu-tionary new concept of schooling started in1968wi thanessaywritten bypsycho-educa-tor Benjamin Bloom entitled "Learning forMastery." According toeducation researcherCharlotte Iserbyt, who formerly worked forthe U.S. Department of Education, masterylearning isbased onB. F. Skinner's behavior-ist conditioning techniques. Inan article onmastery learning in the November 1979is-sue of Educa ti ona l Leadershi p, Carl D. Glick-man writes:

Mastery learning isbuil ton the assumption thatthe majority of children can become equal in theirability to learn standard school tasks. As Bloom haswritten, "To put itmore strongly, each student maybe helped to learn a particular subject to the same

degree, level of competence, and even in approxi-mately the same amount of time." ...What mastery learning does is replace "page

55"with "criterion-referenced materials" or "learn-ing modules." As Bloom describes it, the more ad-vanced students who finish the work quickly arebusy with enrichment materials; themiddle third usethe full40minutes todo the work; and the other thirdneed extra time for reinforcing work, peer tutoring,and individual teacher consultations. Ideally, mas-tery learning works so that the previously faster,average, and slower students eventually reach thesame levels of proficiency, and from that point onstudents canbe taught together asagrou p,masteringthe same materials at the same time.

Does mastery learning actually work?A mastery-learning experiment involvingreading instruction was conducted in thepublic schools of Chicago beginning in themid 1970s. Concerning the new program,the Ch icago T rib un e of November 16 r 1977reported: "It has been ten years in themak-ing, but Chicago school officialsnowbelievethey have in place a complete, sweepingprogram to teach children to read - a pro-gram that may be a pacesetter for the na-tion."

An article in Learning magazine ofThe Blumenfeld Education Letter is published monthly. Sources of products and services described are not necessarily endorsedby this publication. They are intended to provide our readers with information on a rapidly expanding field of educational activity.Permission toquote isgranted provided proper credit isgiven. Originalmaterialis copyrighted by The Blumenfeld Education Letter.Subscription Rate: 1 year $36.00. Address: Post Office Box 45161,Boise, Idaho 83711. Phone (208) 343-3790.


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Education Letter, Pg. 2 , April 1993

November 1982explained how theprogram,dubbed Continuous Progress - MasteryLearning (CP-ML),operated:

The program wor ked like this: Each elementaryschool student was accompanied by a "skill card"listing various reading skills at different levels fromkindergarten through eighth grade. The traditionalK-8 elementary school organization had been abol-ished; instead, students progressed from level Athrough level N during their nine years in elementaryschool. Teachers were required to teach each skill toindividual children [or reading groups]; then thechildren were tested on each skill. Those who scored80percent or better on a skill test moved on to the nextskill; those who mastered 80 percent of the skills atany given level moved on to the next level; and thosewho mastered 80 percent of all the skills moved on tohigh school, theoretically able to read.

How well did this method work? Thearticle explains:

Pupils, for their part, were becoming very astuteat taking and passingsubskill tests, but not at reading.A growing number of students, many teachers said,were entering high school having successfully com-pleted the CP-ML program without ever having reada book and without being able to read one.

It didn't take long before parents begantodiscover that their children weren'tleam-ing toread under theprogram and they fileda lawsuit demanding the removal of theprogram from the Chicago public schoolsbecause, in their view, the program consti-tuted "educational malpractice."

In 1981,Ruth Love, theSuperintendentof the Chicago public schools, asked theschool board to replace the ContinuousProgress -Mastery Learning program with anew one called Chicago Mastery LearningReading (CMLR). As for the CP-ML pro-gram, BenjaminBloom told areporter: "Theoriginal Continuous Progress - MasteryLearning curriculum had littleofcontinuousprogress init and nomastery learning. Iwasnever consulted."

In other words, no one was willing to

take responsibility for thefiasco. Butwas thenew program any better than the old one?The same article in Learning states:

But as the school year progressed, school offi-cials made fewer and fewer claims that CMLR wascompletely different from Continuous Progress. Thebehavioral objectives were the same, although insome instances two objectives had been subsumedunder one criterion-referenced test. The skills se-quence was the same. The criteria for "mastery" werethe same. In fact, CMLR culminated the streamliningof Continuous Progress -Mastery Learning. First theschool system established objectives; then it wrotetests for each objective; and finally, itproduced mate-rials to teach the answers to the tests that tested theobjectives.

It didn't take too long before parentsbegan to realize that the new program was,indeed, no better than the old one. Thechildren weren't reading books. The cur-riculum simply consisted of 5,000pages ofmaterials that taught behavioral objectives.But even the content of the lessons troubledparents. Learning states:

A fourth grade comprehension lesson, for ex-ample, featured a story called "Whiskey and Sweets,"which depicted a drunken father tricking his son intobuying him whiskey and sweets by feigning a heartattack.A third grade spoof on Cinderella ended withthe hero fi tting the slipper on the foot of "an ugly fortyyear old lady who weighed three hundred pounds"and living "unhappily ever after." Junk food wasmentioned frequently ("A Big Mac is heaven on abun"); lessons ofurban life were red uced to the basestlevels.

What were the final results of this five-year experiment with mastery learning? Thearticle spelled it out in stark, unequivocalterms:

On April 21, 1982, Chicago's superintendent ofschools, Ruth Love, released the results of the city'sfirst high school reading test in seven years. Thescores were abysmally poor .... On the Tests ofAcademic Progress (TAP) administered in the fall of

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Education Letter, Pg. 3, April 19931981, Chicago's eleventh graders in 64 high schoolsscored at the 25th percentile - a drop of 5 percentilepoints from the last time the test was given, in 1975.

The details were appalling. Only 4 ofthe 64 high schools scored above the 50thpercentile, 34 scored below the 20th percen-tile, and 5 schools, with a total enrollment ofmore than 7,500,scored at the 10th percentile(a score students could have achieved bysimply answering the questions as random).In other words, learning by "behavioralobjectives" does not produce true learning.Will Outcome-Based Education do anybetter? To get that answer we have to knowmore about Bill Spady who not only coinedthe term Outcome-Based Education but hasworked for the last twenty years to promoteits use throughout North America.The S p ady Bunch

In an interview published in EducationalLeadership (Dec. 1992), Spady tells us thatwhile as a graduate student at the Universityof Chicago and a member of the admissionsstaff, he recruited as a freshman a student bythe name of Jim Block, a "bright, intense,athletic young man." During the next fouryears Block and Spady became fast friends.After Block got his bachelor's degree, Spadyintroduced him to Benjamin Bloom. Spadysays: "Block became Ben Bloom's graduatestudent just as Bloom was developing the'Learning for Mastery' idea. Block did a lotof the basic research in 'Learning for Mas-tery' and I was one of the earliest to knowabout it because I'd heard it straight fromJim, as it was unfolding."Spady then moved on to Harvard toteach social relations and ed ucation. He alsogot interested in organizational theory. Hesays:

So, when Block told me about the the funda-

mental changes associated with mastery learning-turning time into a variable instead of time being aconstant, and having what I now would call a crite-rion base for standards instead of comparative stan-dards - I found the ideas theoretically compelling,and I took them immediately to the educational sys-tem level- because to me the fundamental barriersto making the mastery learning idea work were at theorganizational and institutional level. SoI said to JimBlock - I mean we literally made an agreement thatday - "You fix the classrooms, I'll work on the totalsystem."

And so,Outcome-Based Education wasborn. Note that Jim Block's mas tery learningmethodology would be the classroom modeof instruction, and Spady would reorganizethe entire ed uca tion system to make masterylearning work. In other words, the systemicbarriers to learning that were part and parcelof traditional education would have to beremoved.The plan, obviously, was based on theassumption that the traditional school wasan obstacle to learning. But was that true?There was a time, and this writer remembersit well, when the public schools did a prettydecent job of teaching children the basicacademic skills along with history, geogra-phy, foreign language, touch typing, etc.That was certainly the case in the 1930s and405when this writer attended public schoolsin New York City.

Itwas only after the introduction of thenew Dewey-inspired progressive curricu-lum, with its whole-word, look-say readingprogram and its shift in emphasis from thedevelopment of the intellectual skills to thedevelopment of the social skills, that the tra-ditional model begin to fall apart. Tradi-tional education relied on intensive phonicsin reading, cursive penmanship in writing,memorized arithmetic facts, and separatesubject matter for its academic success.Today, nothing works in public education,not merely because of the way the system isorganized, but because of its psychology-

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Education Letter, Pg. 4 ,April 1993

based teaching methods, its obsession withthe affective domain, and its perverse andcorrupted substance. The system has be-come unreformable.And so an entirely new kind of systemmust be created in order to make behavioristmastery learning work. If it failed in Chi-cago, aBE theory tells us, it was because ofthe system, notthe program. Outcome-basededucation is the new system.According to Spady, our present tradi-tional instruction system (which producedthe most literate nation in history until 50years ago) is a relic of the industrial age,therefore we need a new delivery systembased on mastery learning techniques (withno known record of success anywhere); thepresent school calendar is a relic of the agri-cultural age, therefore we need a year-roundschool calendar that sweeps the sacrosancttwo-month summer vacation into the dust-bin of history; and the present traditionalphilosophy of education is a relic of thefeudal age (because it respected religion andparental rights) and is no longer suitable forthe information age. What we need, saysSpady, is a total revolution, a paradigmaticchange.R e v o lu t i o n f r o m t h e T o p

Spady is an establishment operative whoknows how to organize a revolution fromthe top, a revolution planned and funded bythe wealthy humanist foundations (Carne-gie, Ford, Rockefeller), the graduate schoolsof education, the state departments of edu-cation, and the federal government: clearly arevolution from the top, which is not exactlythe democratic way of doing things. In fact,parents across the nation are up in arms overthe new plan.But that's how it's been in public educa-tion from the very beginning. The academicelite foisted government education on the

American people in the 1830s, 40s, and 50s.The progressive academic elite imposed itssocialist, humanist "reforms" on the publicschools during most of the 20th century, andthe new psycho-educationist elite will de-stroy whatever is left of the traditional sys-tem and replace it wi th an expansionist, NewAge, holistic system of total control bearingthe aBE label.What Are the Outcomes?

That's the crucial question in outcome-based education. How do we decide whatthe outcomes should be? According toSpady,'We are starting with what the researchsuggests about the future and we designdown, or design back, from there. We'retalking about a systematic process calledStrategic Design: determining as well as wecan from studying the literature and avail-able data about future trends and condi tionswhat our kids will be facing out there in theworld."And so the first thing you must knowabout outcome-based education is that isbased on a new, glorified form of fortunetelling. Instead of using a crystal ball topredict what a student will be doing twentyyears hence, they will use Strategic Design.And on the basis of that vision of the futurethe entire curriculum will be designed.But what happens if the future turns outdifferently? Tough luck.The simple truth is that nobody canpredict the future with any great degree ofaccuracy. We couldn't even predict ten yearsago that the entire communist system inEastern Europe would collapse. No onecould have predicted the Gulf War, even sixmonths before it started. To base an entireeducation system on visionary assumptionsabout the future is not only foolish but dan-gerous. What students should be taught arebasic academic skills that they can use under

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Education Letter, Pg. 5,April 1993

any circumstances as well as the timelessspiritual andmoral values that onlytheBibleprovides. The Bible has endured for over2,000years as the unchanging standard andguide to a moral, healthy, and productivelife regardless of the forms civilization hastaken.Butthevisionaries ofOBEhave a differ-ent view. In Spady's conference guide en-titled Transformational Outcome-BasedRestructuring, we read:

The visionary purpose reflects the rapidly chang-ing social, economic, political, cultural, and environ-mental context in which our current students willlive. As a result, Transformational OBE is inherentlyfuture-oriented and focuses on students' life-longadapti ve capaci ties. Itrequires a fundamental shift inthe prevailing paradigm of educational leadership,policy-making, priority setting, outcome defining,curriculum design, instructional deli very, assessmentand credentialing, decision making, and implemen-tation strategies.

The key word is "visionary," and suc-cess in the OBEschool ismeasured in termsofhowwell thestudent achieves the "vision-ary higher-order exit outcomes."

What is an "outcome"? According toSpady, an outcome is "a culminating dem-onstration of learning." The emphasis is onperformance, not content, on behavior, notknowledge. A "high-level culminating out-come" is a "complex role performance."Curriculum and instruction are geared to"what we want the kids to demonstratesuccessfully at the end."

Will the traditional subject-based cur-riculum be abandoned? Yes, says Spady,"But content itself can't disappear; we justdevelop a fundamentally different rationalefororganizing and using it;one that islinkedmuch more to the significant spheres ofsuccessful living rather than to separatedisciplines and subjects."

In that case, how willhistory be taught?Spady's view is that there should not be a

separate course called history "that starts atsomeancient timeand moves forward tothepresent." Thestudents should "thoroughlyexamine current problems, issues, and phe-nomena in depth and ask why, why, why,about their origins and relationships."

Which means that somewhere along theline, perhaps at home without the psycho-visionaries breathing down his neck, thestudent willhave the chance tostudy historyif he wants to understand the origins oftoday's problems which only a chronologi-cal study of history can elucidate. Withhistory being taught in hisOBEschool onlyasan adjunct tocurrent events, hewillnot belearning history as an ongoing drama ofhuman action.

Sowhat becomes thepurpose ofeduca-tionunder OBE?Theconferenceguide states:

Transformational Outcome-Based Educationexists to equip all students with the knowledge,competence, and orientations needed for them tosuccessfully meet the challenges and opportunitiesthey will face in their career and family lives aftergraduating.

What are "orientations"? They are litheaffectiveand attitudinal dimensions oflearn-ing" that deal with the student's emotions,motivation, "attitudes," and relationships.The wrong attitudes - the spiritually andpoliticallyincorrectattitudes-will nodoubtbecorrected byvalues clarification. Thecon-ference guide states:

Teaching, mentoring, and advising lie at theheart ofclose personal relationships ... and representthe core aspects of close interpersonal bonding, re-spect, and friendship. Teachers and mentors cansuccessfully change the thinking, skills, orientations,and motivation of others through the explanationsthey provide, the counsel they give, and the examplethey set.

Akeypremise ofOBEisthat allstudentscanlearn and succeed and that theschoolcancontrol the conditions of success. In other

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Education Letter, Pg. 6 r April 1993

words, time constraints will no longer de-cide how long a student remains in school.He will remain there as long as he has to inorder to be able to demonstrate in an "au-thentic contexttheoutcomes ofsignificance."As the pro-Ofsfipolicymakers inMinnesotasaid when Spady told them that not everystudent would be in school for the samelength of time or take the same courses, "Ifthey can't demonstrate the outcomes of sig-nificance, then we shouldn't be letting themout of school."

Apparently, changes in the compulsoryattendance laws will have to be made toaccommodate this feature of aBE. In fact,aBE is avery good reason why compulsoryschool attendance laws should be repealedbecause they violate the civil rights of aspecificage-group ofAmericans whowillbeforcibly subjected to brainwashing of themostblatant kind. There isnoroom inafreesociety for an education system that forceschildren to undergo unspecified attitudinalchanges in order to conform to the valuesand standards of an empowered elite.H i l l a r y A p p r o v e s

And what happens after the student hasjumped through all of the hoops and candemonstrate a "higher order competency inacomplex roleperformance"? According toHillary Clinton and Ira Magaziner in an ar-ticleinEducational Leadership (Mar. 92,p. 12):

Students passing a series of performance-basedassessments tha t incorporate this new standard wouldbe awarded a Certificate of Initial Mastery. Posses-sion of the certificate would qualify the student tochoose among going to work, entering a college pre-paratory program, or studying for a Technologicaland Professional Certificate .... The states should takeresponsibility for assuring that virtually all studentsachieve the Certificate of Initial Mastery. Throughnew local employment and training boards, states,with federal assistance, should create and fund alter-native learning environments for those who cannot

attain the Certificate of Initial Mastery in regularschools.There you see the makings of a three-

tier society: auniversi tyeliteat the top, borntorule; abody oftechnicians and profession-als tokeep thewheels ofgovernment, indus-try and the service economy workingsmoothly; and the "workers" who will beatthebottom ofthenew caste system. Perhapsthis is the kind of system Spady and hisfellow visionaries have conjured up in theircrystal balls. They certainly are preparingAmerican students for that kind of society.Spady says:

In January of 1980 we convened a meeting of 42people to form the Network for Outcome-BasedSchools. Most of the people who were there - JimBlock, John Champlin - had a strong background inmastery learning, since itwas what OBEwas called atthe time. But I pleaded with the group not to use thename "mastery learning" in the network's new namebecause the word "mastery" had already been de-stroyed through poor implementation.

Apparently, Spady and his colleaguesthink that they can do a much better job ofimplementation. But they are wrong, be-cause mastery learning isnot based on atrueknowledge of the mind, and that is why itfailed somiserably inChicago. But now theentire nation will be subjected tothis insaneexperimentation.

What worked wen in the past is beingdiscarded because itrepresents aGod-givenview of the mind. The psychologists prefertheir own view based on animal behavior.And that makes itmore imperative than everfor parents to keep their children out of thegovernment schools.

Thepsycho-educators know that alargenumber of children will not be able to learnto read under mastery-learning methodol-ogy, and they are already preparing Ameri-can industry to accept that reality. It wasProf.Anthony Oettinger ofHarvard Univer-

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Education Letter, Pg. 7, April 1993

sity's Division of Applied Science who toldan audience of executives in 1981:The present 1/ tradi tional" concept of Iiteracy hasto do with the ability to read and write. But the realquestion that confronts us today is: How do we help

citizens function well in their society? How can theyacquire the skills necessary to solve their problems?Do we really want to teach people to do a lot of sumsor write in "a fine round hand" when they have a five-dollar handheld calculator or a word orocessor towork with? Or do we really have to have everybodylitera tc - wri ting and reading in the trad .tional sense- when we have the means through our technologyto achieve a new flowering oforal communication? Itis the traditional idea that says certain forms of com-munication, such as comic books, are "bad," But inthe modern context of functionalism they may not beall that bad.

Obviously, the parents in Chicago whosued the schools for "educational malprac-tice" were not interested in having theirchildren learn how to read comic books.They certainly were in favor of the tradi-tional concept of literacy and had expectedthe schools to be in favor of it t00. But theywere wrong. Prof. Oettinger revo, .ls the trueaims of the educational elite whe n he asks,"Do we really want to teach, etc." The keyword is "want" and his implied answer tohis rhetorical question is "No, we really donot want to teach children to read and writein the traditional sense." And that is whatAmerican parents must come to grips with:the reluctance ofAmerican educators toreallyimpart high literacy.

Unbelievable QuotesWe found the following quote in The

Whole L an gu ag e Cata lo g, page 71. It is from abook by James Moffett, Storm in the M oun-tains. Moffett is identified as "a major foun-dational thinker of the whole languagemovement" :

"God believes in the beauty of phonics" meansthat those who see themselves as God's spokespeopleprefer phonics precisely, I think, because it shuts outcontent by focusing the child on particles of languagetoo small to have any meaning. In other words, whatphonics really amounts to for those who are sure theyhave a corner on God's mind but are very unsure ofbeing able to hold their children's minds is anotherway to c en so r books (unconsciously, of course) b y nip-p in g lite ra cy its elf in th e b ud .

That's about as stupid a statement as Ihave read to date on phonics by a "founda-tional whole language thinker" or anyoneelse for that matter. The great benefit ofintensive phonics is that it produces an inde-pendent reader who can read anything he orshe wants to read. The idea that ''by focusingthe child on particles oflanguage too small tohave any meaning" you can permanentlyprevent the child from understanding whathe is reading is ridiculous beyond words.Apparently,:Mr. Moffett has quite a thingabout Christian parents, because itwas oneof his books along with other materials thatbecame the object of parental protests inKanawha County, West Virginia, in 1974.That's why he thinks that Christian parentslike phonics, because it will prevent theirchildren from being able to read his books!

Gay Teachers W in ProtectionGay teachers in Portland, Maine, havenew protection against discrimination. The

Portland School Committee voted 9-0 (11/11/92) to approve a homosexual rights pol-icy after hearing parents and others speakfor and against it. Some supporters said thepolicy completes protection under the city'sgay rights ordinance. Portland voters up-held that ordinance in a referendum in theNov. election. (Boston Globe, 11/12/92)

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Education Letter, Pg. 8 IApril 1993 ~

C ondoms A v ailab le in N ewHampsh ire Schools

Portsmouth High School will be the firstNew Hampshire school to make condomsavailable to students as the result of a schoolboard vote on an AIDS prevention program.Six of the ten board members on 11/11/92approved a health committee's recommen-dations for a broad AIDS prevention pro-gram that includes making condoms avail-able through the high school nurse. Thecommittee suggested latex condoms bemadeavailable after the school nurse providesverbal and written instructions. (Bos ton Globe,11/12/92)

Teen M emb er of O ccult G roupCommits Su icide

A teenager who committed suicide inSun Prairie, Wisconsin, was in a 50-memberoccult group of area students, Police ChiefFrank Sleeter said. The beliefs of the groupare based on some recent books, movies andheavy metal rock music, he said. (USA To-day, 2/12/93)

Top S tudents G et Low S coresin C iv ics

Many students at the nation's elite uni-versities are political illiterates who cannoteven name their U.S. senators, according to asurvey released 4/5/93. The survey of stu-dents at Ivy League colleges found manylack the basic knowledge of American his-tory and civics required for U.S. citizenship.

Three out of four could 710t identifyThomas Jefferson as the author of the open-ing words of the Declaration of Indepen-

dence. Three out of five could not name fourSupreme Court justices, half could not nametheir two U'S. senators and 44 percent couldnot identify Thomas Foley as speaker of theU'S. House of Representatives.

According to Jeff Lichtman, a seniorcommunications major at the University ofPennsylvania who helped conduct the sur-vey, no student made a perfect score on the17-question civics portion of the 200-ques-tion survey. According to the results, 36percent did not know who follows the vicepresident in the line of presidential succes-sion, 35 percent could not identify the chair-man of the Federal Reserve Board and 35percent could not name the prime ministerof Great Britain.The project was supervised by adjunctassistant professor Frank Luntz, a fellow atHarvard University's Institute of Politics.Luntz said students who read newspapersand magazines were better informed andscored better on the history and civics ques-tions. "The problem is too few students readdaily newspapers," he said.

Luntz said the most striking findingwas that students absorb the biases and cul-tural prejudices of their environmen t. Drink-ing and sexual behavior, for example, ap-peared tobe directly correlated to the behav-ior of their parents. And an overwhelmingmajority of the students described the mediaas biased, even thottgh most neither readnewspapers nor watch television news.

"These students are like vacuum clean-ers," he said. "If they are not told theyshould know about their country, they willnot learn."

The survey found that sex, drugs andalcohol are part of the college experience formost Ivy League students. Sixty percent ofthe freshmen described themselves as vir-gins, but only 12 percent of the seniors did.(Bosto n G lobe, 4/6/93)

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The Blumenfeld education Letter April_1993