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2. The WA OBE system is experimental - our children are being used as guinea pigs.

3. OBE is dumbing down our schools by holding the entire class to a level attainable by every child. The average and above average students are held back and used to help the weaker students in group and "cooperative learning".

4. In the WA OBE system, academic and factual subject matter is replaced by vague and subjective learning outcomes. There is no real Curriculum.

5. A high percentage of WA OBE “outcomes’ concern values, attitudes, opinions and relationships rather than objective information. A large number of OBE’s goals are affective (concerned with emotions and feelings) rather than academic (concerned with knowledge and cognitive skills).

6. There seems to be concern from Universities over how they will be able to determine which students get places under the OBE system of "levels" assessment.

An opinion from retired Associate Professor Steve Kessell, Science and Mathematics Education Centre, Curtin University:

It is time for the curriculum council, the education department, the education minister and the premier to stop misleading the public. The teachers who oppose OBE are not a handful of trouble-makers and ratbags. As shown by votes (where they were allowed) at recent professional development sessions, the overwhelming majority of year 11 and 12 teachers believe the new courses are not ready. A great many believe they never will be ready. These new courses share (at least) two fatal flaws.

Firstly, there is no curriculum. Teachers are expected to develop their own to illustrate the listed outcomes. This will invite a least common denominator, one size fits all, approach. Learning about the sociology of the cosmetic industry is not real chemistry, discussing whether air bags should be mandatory is not real physics, and movie posters are not real literature. Students continuing on to university, TAFE or the workforce will be disadvantaged seriously. A “culturally-sensitive curriculum” borders on nonsense. Some cultures have no numbers larger than 20, and at least one recognises only “one, two and many”. Shall we teach mathematics on this basis?

Secondly, the “levels” proposed to measure student achievement are meaningless, edu-babble drivel. If you take a Level 5 descriptor, and add words such as “regularly, independently and fully”, you now have a Level 6 descriptor. Level 6 will get your daughter into university, but Level 5 won’t. No matter how conscientious the teacher, her subjective view of how regularly, independently and fully your daughter (one of her 120 students) performs can mean university acceptance or denial. This is totally unfair to the parent, the student and the teacher.

The minister and the curriculum council are disingenuous when they compare the proposed WA OBE courses to those in NSW. In NSW, every course has a detailed syllabus – the one for their equivalent of “maths, chance and data” is 83 pages long. The WA equivalent in 3 pages of notes for teachers – beyond that, teachers are expected to “wing it” as they go ! Furthermore, NSW uses traditional grades, not the Mickey-Mouse levels proposed here. There really is no comparison.

As a retired university professor and course coordinator, I appreciate how difficult it is to determine a university cut-off even with TEE results; with OBE, it will be impossible. I also anticipate university courses will need to be extended an extra year to compensate for students’ poor preparation. Is this what we want for our children?

Parents pleased with OBE delay call "Parent groups have welcomed a directive from the State School Teachers Union of Western Australia that teachers who are not ready to implement the new OBE courses next year should not..."

"The Western Australian Council of State School Organisations (WACSSO), which represents parents, says OBE should not be introduced if it creates problems.

"WACSSO acting president Kylie Catto says parents want to know that students will get the best deal and she believes teachers are delaying the courses in the interest of their pupils."

Full article in ABC News Online at http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200605/s1648834.htm

Supporters of outcomes-based education are fond of saying this new educational method is the only way to properly equip students for the modern world. Yet as "The Australian" , "The West Australian" and even "The Financial Review" have reported over the past several months, the OBE system being put forward for Western Australia's Year 11 and 12 classrooms does anything but. For one thing, it is based on a failed program Victoria implemented 12 years ago – and abandoned just two years later. For another, this particular curriculum looks like nothing more than a transparent attempt to replace skills with sociology and make it quite literally impossible for students to fail. In West Australian physics classrooms, tough calculations are to be replaced with discussions on "the ethics of making airbags compulsory". Maths students will no longer be penalised for incorrect calculations. This in a state which cannot field enough scientists and engineers to keep driving its resource boom. In English and media classes, meanwhile, poor spelling, grammar and punctuation will no longer count against test-takers.

"It is time for Western Australia to put the brakes on this curriculum before any more money is wasted or young minds jeopardised. The state Government has already committed nearly $15 million in extra funding over four years to extend outcomes-based education into Year 11 and 12 classrooms (it has been used in other grades since 1998). And this does not include the two-year, 12 per cent wage increase the Government dangled in front of teachers – a cynical, if unsuccessful, attempt to get the chalkies to drop their opposition to the plan. The curriculum's list of opponents is impressive. The State School Teachers Union says it should be delayed and has told its members to treat the 17 new courses being introduced next year as voluntary. Many members are privately concerned that the new system will destroy the teaching of subjects they love, and with parents have formed a lobby to fight the changes. Their concerns have been backed by a parliamentary inquiry. Private school teachers have also called for a delay. One of Western Australia's chief examiners has threatened to quit over the issue, and federal Education Minister Julie Bishop has suggested the state's federal education funding could be in jeopardy as a result of the curriculum. Even the Prime Minister has labelled the new system "gobble****ok". Yet state Education Minister Ljiljanna Ravlich remains firm, and her Government last week threatened to bust non-compliant teachers down to earlier grades.

The Minister of Education, Ljiljanna Ravlich, probably believes she has now quashed all opposition to her introduction of OBE in WA by announcing that Students at high schools which refuse to teach new outcomes-based education courses will not qualify for university under new education rules revealed yesterday.

Although 80% of School Teachers in the Union (that were allowed to vote and actually consulted albeit by the union) voted against implementation of the new OBE style Courses of Study (OBE COS).

The parents group (WACSSO) are supportive of the teachers opposition.

The leaders of the finest schools in the state (Wesley, Scotch, Rossmoyne, Applecross, St Stephens, St Hildas ...)

The Federal Minister of Education Julie Bishop, who said yesterday that the way the shift to outcomes-based education in upper school in WA had been handled was an "absolute disgrace" and called on Federal Opposition Leader Kim Beazley to intervene to delay it.

"THE only West Australian high school teacher to receive a National Excellence in Teaching award this year has condemned the state's proposed new curriculum for making physical education equal to mathematics in the eyes of markers. Stephen Corcoran, honoured this week for innovative maths teaching, claims the proposed gradeless curriculum for years 11 and 12 - in which all subjects can lead to university entrance -- is flawed.

"It's a recipe for disaster," he said. "I think everyone's hoping it will all go away."

When will the Premier and the Minister wake up and realise that the courses are the problem (not the teachers, parents, students, newspaper editors and others they have tried to blame).

These pathetic courses written by incompetent bureaucrats at the Curriculum Council are the problem. They lack the most basic elements of an educational course such as a syllabus, decent examinations and marking guides.

Delay, to fix these miserably inadequate courses, or better still dispense with them all together.

Anti-WA OBE article in today's AustraliaN (June 9, 2006)

Kevin Donnelly: History repeats as WA ignores exam lessons

The spectre of Joan Kirner haunts Western Australia's much maligned new education system
09 June 2006

IT'S a pity that neither Western Australia's Premier, Alan Carpenter, nor his Education Minister, Ljiljanna Ravlich, appears to have studied history. If either had, they would know George Santayana's famous aphorism, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

Music courses where students do not play instruments or learn musical notation, students studying the ethics of airbags in physics, chemistry about the sociology of cosmetics, English examinations in which students are not penalised for faulty spelling, grammar and punctuation, and literary classics replaced with movie posters and SMS messages.

The sad fact is the imbroglio that is WA's adoption of outcomes-based education, especially in years 11 and 12, could have been averted if those in control had bothered to learn from the past.

It is also clear that no amount of crisis management or last-minute tinkering at the edges, represented by Carpenter's willingness to remove some of the more egregious, dumbed-down elements of the new courses, will save the OBE juggernaut.

The proposed WA Certificate has much in common with the much-maligned Joan Kirner-inspired Victorian Certificate of Education. The VCE, as originally designed during the early 1990s, imposed a one-size-fits-all approach to curriculum, was anti-competitive and anti-academic and imposed a debilitating and unreliable system of assessment.

Such were the flaws in the VCE that the then vice-chancellor at the University of Melbourne, David Penington, threatened that the university would introduce its own entrance examinations, and the election campaign leading to the ALP's loss featured a "guilty party" advertisement highlighting a picture of Joan "VCE" Kirner.

More recently, the public debacle last year in relation to New Zealand's National Certificate of Educational Achievement, which also increased the role of school-based assessment in opposition to centrally controlled end-of-year examinations, highlighted the difficulty of guaranteeing comparability of grades across schools.

When students sit an externally set and marked examination there is a level playing field and it is possible to ensure that the grades given, used to rank students in terms of ability and merit and for tertiary selection, are comparable.

With school-based assessment, where students undertake projects and tests monitored and marked at the school level, it is impossible to ensure that the grade given to a student in one school is comparable to a grade given in another school.

As highlighted by the Victorian experience, it is also impossible to authenticate work, given that much is completed outside the classroom over an extended period.

Moderation meetings, where teachers meet and agree on what constitutes a particular grade to ensure consistency, are time-consuming and expensive. And, as demonstrated by events in WA, if the curriculum outcomes are vague and unclear, it is almost impossible to reach consensus.

Not only have those responsible for WA's education system failed to learn from history, but they have also ignored how stronger-performing overseas education systems structure their senior school certificates.

Researchers associated with the Kiel Institute of World Economics conclude that those systems that outperform Australian students in mathematics and science tests have centrally controlled, competitive examinations, based on strong academic standards where students are ranked one against the other.

Instead of a one-size-fits-all approach, better-performing education systems also have a highly differentiated secondary curriculum in which students, depending on ability and interest, can choose between certificates, ranging from academic to vocational to trade.

In trying to justify WA's faddish approach to curriculum, Ravlich has been quoted as saying that outcomes-based education is "the way of the future" and that it has been adopted by "30 other OECD nations".

If OBE is the way of the future, why did the 1995 Eltis Report in NSW argue that there was little, if any, evidence proving the benefits of OBE or that it had been successfully adopted elsewhere?

The truth is, as noted by Gita Steiner-Khamsi, an academic at Columbia University and a consultant to the World Bank, only a handful of countries ever adopted OBE. She states: "During OBE's phase of slow growth in the late 1980s and early 1990s, only a few educational systems adopted the reform, notably New Zealand, Australia, England and Wales, Canada and the US."

In the US, such were the attacks on the politically correct, dumbed-down nature of OBE when it was introduced during the '90s that all states have long since ditched the outcomes approach in favour of syllabuses that are academically based, succinct, clearly defined and teacher-friendly.

When in Perth last year, the previous federal education minister, Brendan Nelson, described OBE as a cancer. He is correct and, like shifting the chairs on the Titanic, no amount of last-minute compromise by Carpenter can disguise the reality that OBE is misconceived and fundamentally flawed.

Kevin Donnelly is director of Melbourne-based Education Strategies. On June 20 he will be involved in a public meeting in Perth, organised by the Institute of Public Affairs, discussing outcomes-based education.

Why the State will not listen to reason on OBE
by Don Watts ("West Australian" June 9)

"... Experience tells me that one of the fundamental rights of learners and their parents is to receive unequivocal information on the achievement of a child and that each child should be given an opportunity to face learning objectives that match their readiness.

"In a system aiming at disguising differences, teachers face classes characterised by readiness ranges so wide that it is inevitable that those with lower readiness continue to waste their time attempting the unachievable and those with high readiness are not challenged..."

"At this point I began to see a trend that continues today and is at the basis of the OBE disputation.

"The current movement [for OBE]... is cleverly presented. Who is their right mind would argue against the measurement of "outcomes"?

"Those who would are those that question whether the outcomes sought have educational validity.

"Another group that should question this new system are those who have an interest in whether the information on outcomes provided to the learner and their parents is, firstly understandable, and secondly indicative of readiness for the next stage of development..."

"There are interests in schooling that are simply not concerned about their obligations to provide understandable information on real learning achievements.

"These same interests are not concerned that poor quality information disadvantages those who because of lower standards of readiness remain the under-performers irrespective of the reasons for their under-performance.

"It is easy to understand why the State Government is not listening to reason on the OBE.

"There is a conspiracy of interests within linked bureaucracies that seeks to control outcomes measurement. The interests of this group are met through an unnecessarily complex assessment regime that protects points of failure and under-investment in a school system that has been neglected for too long. Such a system also limits the differences between the regulated State system and the independent schools and disguises differences in achievement..."

Don Watts is a former professor of chemistry at UWA, vice-chancellor of Curtin University and then foundation vice-chancellor of Bond University

It's doomed to failure ("West Australian" June 9)

"... As a child of post-structuralism, OBE theory lacks the sort of rigour required to be of any real value in practice. And this is precisely why teachers are up in arms. OBE is high on gobbledegook but low on substance. Teaching has traditionally been about substance. Consequently, teachers are extremely confused, not just about what to teach, but about their very identity as custodians and transmitters of society's knowledge and values imperatives. [emphasis added]

"The Curriculum Council's response... is bothersome on two accounts. First, the notion that "this theoretical approach [post-structuralism] is used in Australian universities" is not true... If OBE as a way of "doing university" ever found its way into our tertiary institutions, I and, I suspect, many other academics would resign immediately. OBE is anathema to the very concept of a university. [emphasis added]

"Second, to claim that we're stuck with critical theory... is just plain wrong. There are numerous paradigms which have been developed over the years which, unlike OBE, are replete with evidence of success. An appeal to critical theory for the best paradigm on which to base compulsory education puts the Curriculum Council about 15 years out of date in terms of contemporary models of curriculum theory.

"The Education Minister has regularly pointed to the overwhelming success of OBE in years K-10 as support for extending it to years 11 and 12 But just how has this touted success been measured? Where's the evidence? Rather than continuing with the rhetoric, the Minister, her department and the council would do well to survey K-10 teachers regarding their perceptions of OBE. They may be surprised to learn that post-structural critical theory is not being received quite as enthusiastically as they think it is. They may also find that its progeny, OBE, is not the way in which teachers would prefer to engage in the delivery of educational outcomes."

Richard G Berlach, Assoc Dean, School of Education, University of Notre Dame, Fremantle

Reasons Why We Think O.B.E. Fails Your Child