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Dear Editor;
The Dept of Education is saying that OBE is the mastering of workplace education and that we no longer need all the Academic Studies. When they limit academic subjects in high school to 4 hrs a day and working in actual workplaces for the other 4, they're limiting what the student needs to get into college. They no longer think our children should go to college, since there are plenty of kids from upper middle classes that can handle the number of jobs that are college level. In other words, they are saying only kids whose parents work in college level jobs need that level of academic study.
Even in the Elementary level, where they're taught in groups and the whole group gets the same grade, you end up penalizing the smartest students and giving higher grades to the more marginalized students. And what is happening to the middle students? The smartest students end up tutoring the slow ones, but now the middle students are left with nothing to do until the slow ones pass the test. So, it could take up to two weeks to get all the students to pass the test, and the middle students are left with no more instruction for that amount of time. So who is getting the short stick in this!
OBE is sold to schools as a step up in education, but it's a step down. They offer schools grant money to lure them into it, but the longer they accept grant money, they will find that the requirements are going to get worse. Once your hooked on the extra money it's hard to turn it down, and the way that school budgets are curtailed by deficits every year, it gives school systems more money to operate. But administrators in our schools seem to be interested in only covering the budget, and don't seem to understand the consequences of OBE.
When Obama was still President, he was giving his friends $10,000 a year per child so they could send their kids to a private school, since they didn't want their kids to be dumbed down at a public school. Maybe this is still happening since nobody ever audits the government.
For more information, please read the book "The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America" by Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt or contact me at mfinley6000@gmail.com.
Mary Finley, Mineral Point