OBE: Dumbed-down and Politically Correct
by Dr Kevin Donnelly

and after-talk discussion with Dr Mike Partis, Mr Greg Schofield and Dr Donnelly

The seminar was sponsored by the Institute of Public Affairs, and held at the University of Western Australia on 20 June 2006.

Mr David Axworthy, Acting CEO of the Curriculum Council, and Mr Greg Schofield, teacher, were invited to provide after-talk discussion and to answer questions.

On Friday 16 June, Mr Axworthy, in a vitriolic media release, announced his decision to boycott the seminar. At the last moment, Dr Mike Partis, former Director of the WA Secondary Education Authority, was recruited in Mr Axworthy's place.

Kevin's comments included:

I got involved as an anti-OBE campaigner due to the introduction of the ill-fated Victoria Certificate of Education; I was a Victoria secondary teacher at the time.

Kevin made the following points:

• Historical Approach to Curriculum in Australia
  
  
  1. There has been a shift from "inputs" (class sizes, $$$) to "outputs".
  2. There has been increasing school-based "intended curriculum development" -- that is, turning the "official" curriculum into the "realised curriculum" [the curriculum actually implemented in individual classrooms].
  3. Due to a perceived lack of accountability and fears about standards, OBE was advocated during the 1990's.
  4. Some states and territories tried to adopt William Spady's "transformational (i.e, 'pure') OBE".
     
     
• Characteristics of OBE
  
  
  1. A focus on "learning outcomes"
  2. It assumes that with enough resources and time, all students can succeed. Unfortunately, this is not realistic.
  3. An emphasis on the "new age", the politically correct, and on dispositions, attitudes and feelings.
  4. OBE takes a "developmental approach" -- that is, it assumes that students learn in different ways and at different rates It favours a constructivist approach, meaning that learners construct their own learning.
  5. The teacher becomes a "facilitator".
     
     
• Why OBE has failed
  1. It is untested and untried, and is without independent evaluation.
  2. It is full of jargon and "edu-babble".
  3. No one fails: they have "deferred success".
  4. Teachers are overwhelmed by the number of outcomes and related indicators; there is a "checklist" mentality to assessment.
  5. OBE fails to deal with "the structure of the discipline": it has no epistemological basis. Otherwise it would not try to fit calculus and chemistry into the course template developed for drama and media.
  6. There is a lack of regular testing, a lack of a consequence of failure. There is inadequate feedback when students "get it wrong".
  7. It has failed to adapt to research about effective learning, which says we need more "formal teaching" and less "student-directed learning".
     
     
• Characteristics of stronger-performing education systems
  1. They adopt a strong discipline-based approach.
  2. They provide clear, rigorous, teacher-friendly "intended curriculum" documents.
  3. More time is spent "on task" in the classroom.
  4. There is regular testing and external examinations.

     Example of marathon race:

     Model 1 - Traditional: The times to complete the course are recorded, and every competitor received a "place" (1st, 2nd, 3rd, 10th..., 50th..., 100th...] The three fastest get a medal.

     Model 2 - OBE: Everyone who completes the course gets a gold medal.

• How strong systems define curriculum
  1. Teachers have a clear "road map".
  2. Students are differentiated into year levels and streams based upon ability.
  3. Recognition of the different needs of university-bound students and the rest. This could well mean two different Leaving Certificates.
  4. Detailed curriculum in traditional academic disciplines.
     
     
• OBE Myths and Facts
  • Myth: OBE is widely accepted and a proven system.
  • Fact: OBE was adopted by only a handful of countries, where it has failed / is failing and has been / is being replaced. It was necessary to "soften" - "compromise" "pure OBE" to make it survive.

    The NSW Eltis Report states that OBE is "untested and unproved".
    Bruce Wilson calls it "an unsatisfactory political and intellectual exercise".

  • Myth: OBE is a syllabus and embodies high standards.
  • Fact: OBE is NOT a syllabus. Teachers should not have to spent time writing their own syllabus: they should teach.
    
    
  • Myth: Trust us -- don't panic, it will be OK in the end [say the politicians and bureaucrats].
  • Fact: We are in severe "crisis management" in WA right now. The proposed compromise is a Political Expediency, offering too little, too late.
    
    Will sanity prevail???

   

Response from Dr Mike Partis:

Let me begin by apologising for my presence - I am sure there are other speakers you would prefer to see in the firing line.

I want to tell a story about a Science teacher who was due to give a class on the aneroid barometer. Unusually, he had time to prepare the lesson and in a fit of enthusiasm constructed a model to show how the barometer worked, accompanying it with diagrams, text and so on. The lesson went well, and at the end a girl in the class came up to ask a question. "I understood the lesson," she said, looking at the model "but how do you know which way is north?"

The moral of this story is that if you think you've given a good lesson it means that you have understood it, not the students. Which brings me on to some comments about the teaching/learning process. Put in simplest terms a teacher provides the input and the students demonstrate the outcomes. Too often in the past the focus of curriculum design has been on teacher input with an implicit assumption that the students will learn something. In the Temby Committee ten years ago there was a determined attempt to make the desired outcomes explicit across all teaching areas. That saw the light of day as the Curriculum Framework. I should add that within the Temby Committee there was a minority who argued that the outcomes based approach should only apply up to year 10 level. The fear was that it would be too disruptive to introduce an outcomes approach alongside the TEE system.

So what has gone wrong? Well, basically there has been a strong emphasis on outcomes with a relative neglect of the input necessary to produce those outcomes. What we have seen recently is subject specialists in a number of areas arguing for more prescribed content. The Government has given ground on this point and has agreed with the State School Teachers Union that the seventeen new year 11 courses to be introduced in 2007 will have their content clearly defined. In fact the new courses will stay as close as possible to the courses that they replace.

There has also been criticism of the proposed assessment policies for the new courses. If one reads the policy documents on the web one gets the feeling that the whole structure is assessment driven, and furthermore the wrong things are being assessed. Indeed I was left with the distinct impression that the teacher's role was being changed from instructor to politically correct facilitator. I should confess to a personal heresy here. I have little enthusiasm for student investigations. For most students and in most courses investigations are time-consuming and unproductive. If, for example, you want to teach a class about the French Revolution you need to give them a detailed account of what happened rather than asking them to use a library and the web to find out for themselves. As an aside I should add that when I googled the French Revolution earlier to-day I was referred to over 60 million web-sites.

Let's look at the courses which are coming in next year. Although there has been no public announcement to that effect we must assume that a number of old courses will be phased out according to the schedule which has been laid down by the Curriculum Council. Unless that happens we are witnessing a Clayton's reform. But what does that mean for a subject like Physics? Consider the following extract from the Curriculum Council documentation about the change process.

I should put in a word of caution here. Although the above table is taken directly from the Curriculum Council web-site I can't help wondering whether it is accurate. The units Physical Science and Senior Science are listed to be discontinued this year. But the new Course of Study, Integrated Science, is not due to be introduced until 2008. However, the other units listed will almost certainly go.

From the statements over the week-end new Physics will be virtually identical to old Physics, and so in the 'cut and paste' operation which is about to take place very little room can be found for material from the other courses. But these are all due to disappear. So what happens to the students who would previously have enrolled in one of these other courses? They will be forced into a TEE Physics course, entirely inappropriate for vocationally orientated students. How can this be progress?

I want to touch now on the assessment mechanisms. In the material put out by the Curriculum Council it describes how levels will be converted to marks.

F: First Band   M :Middle Band    H: High Band

Initially it was thought that virtually all students in upper secondary could be classified within the levels 4 to 8. It soon became apparent that for tertiary selection purposes this was not a fine-grained enough scale. And so each level (except 8) has been divided into three bands. These levels and bands will then be converted to a numerical scale, and the resulting number used to generate a percentage mark. That mark will be statistically moderated and combined with the external examination score, with the composite mark then being scaled. What will be reported to students and parents is unclear, though we have been promised that the assessment system will be simplified.

I want to talk briefly about the raising of the school leaving age. Although this is a worthwhile reform, the timing will exacerbate some of the problems in upper secondary. In a ministerial statement last November the Minister made the following points:

But what will the impact really be. Just last week the Director-General had this to say:

There is no need to speculate over where the 7,000 extra students will go. They will end up mainly in government schools, and probably in those schools with low socio-economic catchment areas. Without putting too negative a slant on it many of these students will have an attitude to education somewhere between unenthusiastic and alienated. It is crucially important that we don't sell these students short. In reality their educational needs would be best addressed by a combination of remedial and vocational courses. However, the lower level English courses, Senior English and Vocational English, have been subsumed in the new mainstream English course. A similar situation exists in Mathematics. As for the vocational courses their future is unclear. The situation with Physics shows that some of the established vocational courses could simply disappear.

In summary, I regard the compromise reached by the Government and the Union as a recipe for further chaos. Along with many other problems the people who have to offer course advice to year 10 students and their parents will be standing on quicksand. The Government's handling of these changes has been characterised by ignorance and obstinacy. The Premier and the Minister need to be reminded that in a democracy government depends on the consent of the governed.

Response from Mr Greg Schofield:

• Greg quoted Dr Axworthy's attack on PLATO and then read the rather mild "offending" post -- one of around 25,000 posts on PLATO's Forum.
  
  
• Greg gave a bit of PLATO's history and background.
  
  
• "Despite the efforts and hard work of primary teachers, students now enter secondary school whose general knowledge is appalling !
  • Why? Because there is no curriculum / syllabus in primary. Primary teachers are working in isolation.
  • Kids study Ancient Egypt five years running but have never heard of World War 1.
    
    
• Did the bureaucrats who developed WA's OBE and Levels read the novel "1984" as if it were an "instruction manual"?

Questions from the audience followed, including:

• Q. Why are the universities not joined in this anti-OBE debate?
• A. [Mike Partis] It is a disgrace that they've remained silent. Ditto, it is a disgrace that the Catholic Education Office is trying to stifle debate.
  [Kevin Donnelly] The universities want bodies and $$$.
  [A/Prof Ken Harrison, University representative on the Curriculum Council] The official view of the universities, which I support, is that they want to see more eligible students and an OBE approach in schools. However I have a personal difficulty with the way some aspects of OBE are working out here in WA, particularly in the mathematics and science areas
  
  
• Q. If we don't go the OBE route, how DO we improve schools -- they are currently letting down a lot of kids.
• A. [Greg Schofield] If education were not already on the slide in WA, such a terrible implementation of OBE would not have been possible. It is a "bureaucratic hatchling" and it looks like its parents.

Attendance was approx 300