OBE: Try before you buy.

In a sane and rational society, if someone has a bright idea, what would they do?
Let’s imagine (the Curriculum Council are good at imaging things) that you dream up a new system of education. Let’s call our exciting and innovative new system of education OBE.
What would you do next?
Let’s make this a multiple choice question (although teachers are not allowed to use multiple choice questions any more as they can only be right or wrong and don’t allow the student the freedom of justifying their answer regardless of how little they know about the subject matter).

What would you do with your exciting and innovative new system of education called OBE?

a) See what education systems actually work in the rest of the world and find that OBE is not one of them.
b) Test it in a small number of schools to see if it works.
c) Test it in several schools to see if it works.
d) Implement it immediately in all schools to see if it works. Publish masses of documentation that is written in pure edu-babble jargon that the average teacher, student or parent finds completely incomprehensible and then create an atmosphere of oppression for anyone that speaks out against your educational vision.

A sane and rational education department would choose a (Thus saving WA taxpayers $250 million and having our education standards compromised) or possibly b) (if they really thought they were on to a good thing that had decent syllabi and assessment regimes produced).

The WA government chose d).

Professor Bill Louden (Dean of the Graduate School of Education at the University of Western Australia and Curriculum Council chairman) said "All school changes should be researched, tested and independently evaluated before they are implemented across the State.”
He said that did not necessarily mean that Education Department changes had not been successful, but they should have been independently evaluated by "someone other than the people who wrote it."

The fact that this untested system which has had poor results in other countries was even introduced in the first place speaks volumes of the competence of decision makers within the Department of Education and the Curriculum Council.

Meanwhile Mark McGowan seems to be having difficulty in comprehending the depth of ill-feeling towards OBE in WA with a vague statement of "I will be working on ways in which to progressively implement the recommendations”.
Take some advice minister – Dump levels from K-12 then dismantle this ridiculous system of OBE ASAP.