Selling Competency Based Education
Lurking just over the horizon is the next Big Reformster Thing, a movement designed to take everything wrong with test-based accountability and make it even worse-- Competency Based Education, a Big Dumb Idea Whose Time Has Come (Again). And as this thundering lumox gets closer, we can start to see how it will be sold.
Here's a chatty write-up about CBE from John Baker, a guy who heads up a company that plans to make a bundle off of CBE.
John Baker likes the idea of flexibility, what techno-edu-crats have been selling as personalization. Except that it isn't, really. With CBE, we're talking about computerized learning, and that means that students can only go where the software is prepared to take them. A truly personalized journey would be somebody handing you the keys to a four-wheel-drive land rover and saying, "There's the world. Go explore whatever you want to explore." But this is about saying, "Okay, everybody is going to ride the tracks from Point A to Point Z. If you get to Point D and you need to go back to Point C again, you can do that. If you want to skip ahead and get on at the Point F station, you can do that, too. But everybody is going to ride the same tracks over the same route to the same destination."
Baker is excited about using analytics and giving students choices (play a game! do some drill!), and he anticipates objections:
This flexibility makes some people nervous. There will be those who argue that if education needs CURMUDGUCATION: Selling Competency Based Education: