PerthNorg

Excellent news.

I think it was Kim Beazley who first used the expression that the sound of bums slapping onto the bandwagon will soon be deafening….

For staggering hypocrisy, check this out:

“The State School Teachers Union of WA said it had been lobbying for today’s changes for the last 18 months.

“I’m still struggling to know what OBE means … what I think we’ve resolved is a form of assessment that was not viable, and it was called OBE by the media.”

Mike Keely was one of the authors of the Curriculum Framework - the basis for OBE in WA. Mike Keely is on the Curriculum Council and has been one of the main proponents of OBE. Mike Keely buried and refused to reveal the results of his union’s survey into teachers’ opnions on OBE, when it became apparent that 95-100% of teachers had no confidence in it and had voted to delay the new courses. Mike Keely overrode the will of his union members by supporting the extension of the new OBE courses of study. Now Mike Keely says he doesn’t know what OBE is and blames the media for labelling it Outcome Based Ediucation!!!!!!!!

Hmmm I did work in a related department (sorry, won’t say which one but definitely *closely* related) and I can tell you that every time we sat down to hear how the latest “tweak” to OBE was going to work, there was more confusion.

We had technical people, programmers, and bureaucratic type people, all sitting at these meetings, all going “hnh? wuzza?” because it was like “okay they sort of stick to the general rule here but then you ignore the score and mutiply it by the number of freckles plus a fudge factor determined by how the cows walked into the milking shed” and as far as I could see it was a coldly calculated attempt to remove any idea of performance or score or education level attained from the education system.

So a return to good old fashioned scores is pretty much a bonus, no matter how it’s achieved. Nope, I’m not a teacher nor am I in education. I just know good old fashioned flimflam distraction when I see it, and OBE is flimflam incarnate in my view…

Good riddance to the worst feature of this ridiculous system of education.
Mr McGowan has pushed education at least 5 steps forward (after Ravlich dragged it ten steps backward) in his first major decision regarding OBE in WA.
I wonder when the OBE supporters who hold top posts in the Education Department, Curriculum Council, Teachers Unions, WACOT and English Teachers Association will be held to account?
How will the millions of taxpayers dollars be recovered for the endless train of consultants , “experts” and propaganda exercises that were used to prop up support for a system that aperson with any common sense could see was doomed to failure?

I wonder how many millions of dollars OBE has cost WA taxpayers?
For a system that nobody wanted and was bound to fail.

I think that there will be thousands of relieved teachers around WA knowing that they will not have to put up with the ridiculous levelling system that was devised as part of the OBE package.

Hopefully minister McGowan has realised that the Curriculum Framework and all the other associated OBE documentation is a fraud and was never going to succeed in any school anywhere.

A start - but only that. Firstly, McGowan has widely increased the power of the Curriculum Council when they are responsible for this Curriculum Framework OBE garbage and have been utterly deaf and resistant to all advice that it was totally unworkable. To now give them unfettered power over curriculum and assessment - such that these very same people, most of whom have either never been teachers or if so, only long ago, the same people who declared syllabus not only unneccessary but counterproductive, to write all the new syllabi AND review and accredit their own courses AND the means of assessment in these courses is like giving the Gestapo the authority to oversee the rebuilding of post-war Europe and resettlement of displaced persons! The Curriculum Council should be abolished altogether and those sitting on the existing Council should be investigated and personally held to account for the scandalous waste of $250 million dollars on this transparently futile fad-following frolic which saw a generation of schoolchildren’s education severly compromised and a massive loss to the profession of the most senior, principled and experienced teachers.

Secondly - why are Yr 12 English students and teachers expected to go it alone this year and continue to use the OBE course framework that has has now been accepted to be TOTALLY UNWORKABLE for all other subjects? This is their tertiary entrance year - for Christ’s sake! Is it because the OBE pushers within the CC network have written all the textbooks that they made certain were the only accredited courses and are all set to make money out of their compromised and conflicted positions?

Thirdly - GET RID OF OBE IN PRIMARY SCHOOLS - so that the kids are adequately literate and numerate to progress successfully to high school.

Lots of work yet to do, Mr McGowan before this insidious OBE cancer is finally and totally eradicated.

A very sad week in education. OBE education can work and point scores to 2 decimal places can be determined. I demonstrated the following software to the Curriculum Council but they obviously had no courage to go through with the idea. I would have solved half of the problems.

http://www.assimilatesystems.com/ASProducts.html

Download ‘OBE Assistant’

OBE can be made to work. Point scores generated by the software can be scaled averaged and a bell curve can also be applied. All the department needs to do is to ‘map out’ the levels for concepts for each learning area. It does not matter if they are the right levels as long as everyone is doing it the same. Differences between the subjects can be scaled as is done now.

meldefrancesco

You say: “It does not matter if they are the right levels as long as everyone is doing it the same.”

Here is a letter-perfect quote from one of the Curriculum Council’s new “OBE Level Descriptors”

“The student applies standards and conventions considering cultural values and experiences of the intended audience, demonstrating a repertoire of techniques that highlights the interrelationships between technical competence and expressive qualities while using resources in a positive manner that demonstrates creative and innovative information solutions for a variety of audiences and purposes.”

It is as impossible for everyone to interpret and apply this to a piece of student’s work “the same” as it is for it to be “right”. I’ll bet you can’t even guess what subject this applies to let alone what level.

I suggest if you have reasons to believe OBE can work - and as yet I have never seen any evidence from anywhere in the world that it does, please go to platowa.com and tell them! You’ll get a proper critical appraisal of your ideas and your software package.