It is outcome-based education

The new system is outcome-based education (OBE), which focuses on the minimal educational requirements. It is an education method driven by the peculiar political goal of achieving equal outcome for all students. It pursues that goal in two basic ways:

1. By focusing on the worst students and the minimum threshold needed to pass, and

2. By more or less abandoning students who are above the minimum threshold.

The new system does not aggressively pursue knowledge or academic excellence. On the contrary, it sacrifices these on the altar of equal-outcome. Its main purpose is to flatten differences and reduce variation in student achievement – to the detriment of most students. It penalizes students who are average or better. That is done in an effort to make students equal. The goal is to produce a universally ‘standardized’ student. This is its core, its central essence – a political end.

Minnesota’s administrator of the new system, Commissioner Jax, cheerfully glows that it imparts “equal knowledge” to students. Indeed, that is precisely its tragedy.