Re: [ca-resisters] Districts plan to increase class size

["Alan Young" <alanyoung@mchsi.com>]

The daggers came out not because they were there in the beginning ( at least
generically speaking with what generally happened around the nation). This
is not a flaw that was inevitable in the beginning as some have supposed
reactively trying to suggest early transformational OBE had inherent
problems.  When not standardized and married to the quantifiers, the
comparers, the measures, the testers, all of whom added a dastardly negative
behavioristic motivational structure not in original OBE and a faulty
philosophical view of human nature, couppled with their desire to control
and sort in meritocratic fashion, early OBE had promise. I know that each
has a personal side to this but if you look at the early work . Those on the
side of Nation at Risk, conservative think tanks vehemently opposed this
liberal idea. It was not using heavy terminology of standards.

What happened was that the movement was coopted by conservative, back to
Basic folks, with all there flawed assumptions, with Clinton trying to onw
up them as a political strategy with outcomes turned into results
(Schmoker's ASCD Results work, blah, blah blah) and then again into
standards, and finally into benchmarks. Standards themselves were coopted as
well with the horizontal standards as Kohn describes them not being nearly
so objectionable as the vertical ones and here come the cooptation, the
perversion, and coercion via carrots and sticks and numbers. We had three
goals for high school graduates at Linn-Mar H.S. outside of Cedar Rapids and
voluminous personal ways to show and promote authentic growth in real world
ways and not test scores in 1990. They were something like becoming a
critical, creative, productive thinker, a clear and effective communicator,
and a person who interacted with self and other in constructive fashion.
Lofty, yes. Generic and general, yes. Good. Gave us something to unite
around but did not seek uniformity. But they did help us guide and focus our
curriculum with really constraining. It was bottom up, unrelated to
political pressures or decrees, from a good school trying to be the best it
could be for children. Portfolios to travel throughout school experience,
professionalism respected with much genuine dialogue and input
infrastructure in place including community, parent, teacher, student
involved in the shaping. Project-based, etc. There was little malice or
conspiracy, here, though some did were not as compelled to change as others.
No threats to do so, just input and inclusion, and voice. It helped many get
rid of factoid minutae and encouraged less quantitative measurement and rote
learning.

So it was the coopters involvement I surmise that distorted a promising
approach into this demon.

alan young