Colin McEnroe of NPR in Connecticut has discovered the root problem of corporate reformers: They have lost touch with common sense and the meaning of learning. To cover up their ignorance, they have invented rhetoric that sounds impressive but is no more than unintelligible verbiage.
He starts here, and gets better:
“I don’t know about you, but I remember the moment when, as a boy, I fell in love with learning. It was 1964, in the spring. My fourth-grade teacher, Miss Vick, sat down with me in the late afternoon and gently pried from my hands Hardy Boys book No. 42, “The Secret of the Mummy’s Strategically Dynamic New Paradigms.”
“Colin,” she said. “I know you’re a good boy with a bright mind. But your EAPE scores don’t point to project-based learning across the curriculum. You need to scaffold texts to other texts, and to that end I’m going to start interfacing with your developmental space.”
“Miss Vick,” I stammered, “can you disintermediate that for me in a way that unpacks the convergence in assessment-driven terms?”
We talked for hours as the sun sank toward the horizon. I believe both of us wept. My mind opened like a flower. That night, I chopped my Hardy Boys books into little pieces and fed them to the neighbor’s python. I read Emerson’s “The American Scholar” instead.
Wait. Maybe it didn’t happen that way, because in 1964, American education was not drowning in incomprehensible crap.”
Have we lost the ability to say what we mean and mean what we say?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
amen
“Accountable Talk?”
A perfect parody from CT’s most intellectual and witty commentator/radio host/journalist!
It makes them think they know what they are talking about. They have their exclusive little club where you have to know the secret password.
2old2teach: a perfect combination—incisive, witty, succinct.
It’s another way of disassociating “public” from “schools”—and it’s a TWOFER—
Not only incomprehensible to “insiders” who work and and learn in public schools but a Barrier of Incomprehensibility to “outsiders” (everyone else).
Of course, the next complaint will be that public schools don’t just refuse, but even worse, don’t know how to communicate with the average person about their goals, plans and activities.
Oops! My bad. For edupreneurs and educrats and edubullies it’s a THREEFER.
😡
Agreed! It’s also a way administrators/and their overlords (the corporate reform machine) turn parents against teachers… They use this jargon and it makes them seem as though they have an intellectual insight that they don’t. Parents are befuddled yet reassured that something “serious” is happening with their children. Like the lab coat effect of the Milgram experiment. Simple caring, and character are dismissed and thrown overboard for the more “Robust, target driven execution of the lesson.”
James,
I first read your last sentence as “Robust, target driven execution lesson.”
I believe that my have been the Freudian slip I corrected, twice, before I submitted the comment …
It is my impression that this vocabulary is to be found in schools of education, at least that is where I first heard the term “scaffolding”.
You’re right that education jargon has been around for a while. I’ve been teaching for close to twenty years and it’s always around. But it’s gotten out of control these days.
I have administrators that string together numerous buzzwords that make no sense. Every day I talk with them. Sounds impressive, means nothing.
The phrase I’ve come to despise is “using data to inform instruction.” To inform? That sentence has little clarity. I know what it means but couldn’t we just say, “We should look at student work to determine the best ways to adjust methods of teaching and learning.”
Plus, we are so acronym riddled now that it’s impossible to keep up. Sometimes I feel like I work for a government espionage agency. It’s more code than language.
Exactly!!
“Sometimes I feel like I work for a government espionage agency.”
Perhaps you do. ;P
And don’t even know it!
For the want of a mirror…
LOL. That was deserved, Bernie!
Which is an appropriate place for such talk. Just like I expect medical schools teach med students a lot of medical jargon. I don’t, however, expect my doctor to talk to me in such terms. I expect him to speak in English.
Exactly, Dienne. All professions have a common language, but when talking to the lay person, it’s just good manners for professionals to speak so that people can understand them.
Pryor needs to “decouple” his ego from public speaking engagements and focus on communication instead of inculcation.
Many of the terms in education come from psychology, including instructional scaffolding. Jargon from business and economics is used a lot in graduate schools that prepare school administrators. And, of course, just about all fields have been infiltrated by technology lingo.
I agree that all fields have their own specialized vocabulary. At least some of the vocabulary in the post comes from schools of education, however, not “corporate reformers”. Perhaps it is the schools of education that are using the “gibberish” to cover over their ignorance.
Woa! It sounds like you are calling Diane ignorant for coining the term “corporate reformers.”
That would be a very odd way to read my comment.
Why, because you intended to attack me instead? Sorry, I don’t own ignorance in regard to education, when I’ve been a teacher for 45 years. Maybe you’re projecting, since you accept what people who say what you want to hear at face value without bothering to verify its validity, like Ken Esq’s take on Florida charter school legislation.
No, it is an odd way to read it because I was simply applying Dr. Ravitc’s criteria to all groups that use phases like “scaffolding”.
If I can quote from the original post by Dr. Ravitch “To cover up their ignorance, they have invented rhetoric that sounds impressive but is no more than unintelligible verbiage.”
If we think about who “invented” this rhetoric, don’t we have to go to schools of education?
I don’t know what economics departments do, but people in schools of education do not sit around inventing language. As I already said, many terms in education come from psychology and that is primarily because so much of education is based on psychological research. They originate in different areas of psychology. “Scaffolding” is from cognitive psychology.
If “schools of education” means high school Econ, then yes, it where I heard the word “benchmark” and “value added” used for the first time.
Somehow I do not think any sector in our life has “cornered the market” on useless jargon. Much of what we have gets appropriated from one area through the economy of language (its perspicuity). There is no “rigor” or “monopolization” to our language in any area or field. It is and will always be a fluid and silly thing where there are multiple degrees of separate bastardizations for all the phrases and words in use “under the rainbow.”
beautifully said, Morrigan
And TheMorrigan, that is one powerful evocation
And when did the word “impact” start to define the intended outcome. influence of teachers on students?
What is impact-ful learning?
This is part of an ethos of hit-em harder. It is not just hostile but dangerous to students, teachers and education.
Nancy Baily’s blog has a nice post about: “More Weird New Words for the School Reform Education Vocabulary List” at http://www.nancyebailey.com/2014/01/12/more-weird-new-words-for-the-school-reform-education-vocabulary-list/
Here are her first two definitions:
Arts integration—A euphemism for we have stolen your art programs but really we have art and music included in reading somewhere where we can test it. We have enough drama.
BYOD (Bring your own device) and BYOT (Bring your own technology)—These sound too party-like for me.
She has a long list 🙂
As a side note for those of you concerned about Reform and Special Education- Nancy’s blog addresses these issues on a regular basis. She also has a book, Misguided Education Reform. Nancy is a person I tried to hire years ago when I worked in TN. I was impressed to find her so many years later on the blogoshere.
blogosphere? Misspelling made up words is a specialty of mine. 🙂
Pryor’swords me as managerial business-speak. The use of overly complicated vocabulary and syntax to add weight and a patina of importance to people and their words is nothing new. As a lawyer (rather than a professional educator), Pryor is certainly skillful at using rhetorical tricks.
Also, I am thrilled that the Harford Courant, which has been a tediusly consistent shill for corporo-reformists, is printing more of these sorts of articles lately.
One could create so many Corporate Ed Reform Bingo cards with Stefan Pryor’s first three comments!
To survive the inanity of in-service PD last year, I created Edu-Jargon bingo boards as pdf files for me and several colleagues. Rather than shouting “Bingo!,” which wouldn’t have gone over too well in the middle of a presentation, we emailed one another.
Teachers in San Diego during the years of top-down reform invented a game called B.S. Bingo. Whenever anyone in a PD session would say one of the words, the players could x a square. When they got a straight line, they shouted “Bingo!”
I love the underground subversion. We need more such ideas to relieve the tension undercover. 🙂
K-12 education long labored under mountains of gobbledygook, but the situation was even worse in the business world. And now that we’ve had the corporate takeover of K-12 education, the problem has reach new heights altogether. This is an excerpt from a novel I wrote last year. In the excerpt, I try to capture the sound of a typical business presentation these days. I hope you are up for it. This is not going to be pretty:
“Let me speak, for a moment, from a 50,000-Foot-Perspective,” said T, laser pointer in one hand and projector remote in the other, “While Six Sigma DMAIC and DMADV deployment has certainly Bootstrapped the Operational Efficiencies of Today’s Armed Services, you can’t just throw a New Paradigm Over the Wall and expect people to Drink from the Firehose. A NOC is more than infrastructure and architecture. That’s the Low-Hanging Fruit. Maybe this is what Porras and Collins call a Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal, but I say Best-of-Breed is the only way to go. You’ve got to Implement Cascaded Key Performance Indictors—KPIs—to ensure Stakeholder Buy-in and Alignment and Accountability, not only Along your Verticals but Along your Horizontals as well because what we’re after, here, I’m sure you will agree, is the creation of a COE—a Center of Excellence employing Best Practices. And what do I mean by Best Practices? Why, Scorecarding, of course—that goes without saying—but also De-Siloing, which, as I’m sure you know, is the whole point of Cross-Functional QFD, uh, Quality Functional Deployment, not to mention Matrix Management.”
T surveyed the blank, uncomprehending faces of his audience. He had them just where he wanted them. “And those KPIs—those keys to Alignment—have to be Dashboarded Real-Time and not just floated up into the Adminisphere whenever some Prairie-Dogging GM gets some good news and wants the boss to Bobblehead his bonus. And that’s the Value Proposition of Security-Heightened Information Technologies: we act as Change Agents, not only Architecting the Roadmaps and the Enterprise-Enablers, the Communications Plans and Transformation Plans, but also Facilitating and Fast Tracking the Action Items over the Event Horizon. That’s our Value Add, and if it’s not your Core Competency, and of course it isn’t, that’s the whole point, right, of Privatization? of letting you stick to the business of containing the terrorists? If it’s not your Core Competency, it is ours, and, that’s what we Bring to the Table.
“I know what you’re thinking: of course, there’s always Diminishing Returns on any Hype Curve, but getting the Analytics right isn’t just another Consultancy fad—it’s the Real Deal, it’s what you have to do in Today’s Business Environment, with its Discontinuities and Black Swans. We’ve Ridden the Experience Curve on this one. We’ve done the Knowledge Capture and have the Thought Leaders and the Bandwidth to Knock This Out of the Park—to create a Blue Ocean, if you will. In short, we serve as your Envisioneers. We begin with Capturing Asks, the Voice of the Business and the Voice of the Customer, to Validate the Requirements, and then we Baseline and Benchmark; Map the As Is and To Be; do the Want/Got, the Trending, and the Gap Analyses; establish the Risk Management Parameters with a Failure Means and Modes Analysis. But we don’t stop there, with Shelfware. We actually do the Knowledge Transfer, the Mindshare and Cross-Fertilization, if you will, making sure that your Implementation Team has the Face Time with our PMPs and SMEs to Source it all properly and Queue up the Pipeline so you end up with a Plug-and-Play, Turnkey Solution. And we can Leverage our firm’s Strategic Relationships all along the Value Chain to add further value, with only a modest Incremental appropriation, both to Increase Throughput and Reduce Cycle Time from design to Go Live. And to make sure this is not just some sort of Fire Drill, we Health Check the whole process through the final Toll Gate with our Proprietary Activity-Based Costing.”
T took a deep breath and changed to the next slide. “And if the cost is an issue, let me remind you of the projected ROI. I mean, if the numbers are big at the top of the page, they’re a whole lot bigger at the bottom, and remember that, in the long run, Quality Is Free and pays for itself. And to sweeten the kitty, if this is done properly, you should be able to Demass and Delayer some of those Horizontals I was talking about earlier, so everybody goes home happy. So, the question comes down to whether you need to Run This up the Flagpole or whether can we sign the Incremental S.O.W. right here and now. Or maybe, Colonel Frank, you’d like to Take that part of the discussion Offline.”
The colonel sat back in his chair and thought a bit. After a long while, he smiled. “Son,” he said, “that was some presentation.”
“Thank you, Sir,” said T, “but this was not my presentation alone. It has the full force of Security-Heightened Information Technologies behind it.”
Could you repeat that, please. 🙂
Could you translate that into English please?
Great example! A fun read….
It took one sick mind to write that. Or maybe two!
Thanks, Don Duane, Hidalgo, from one sick mind to another.
The sad and scary part is that I understand 99.9% of the speech, working in a key deformy state as I do.
I have discovered that making a game out of this helps you to survive. For example, if you are subjected to this type of bloated language during professional development you keep a chart an then reward yourself with something once the arrogant, SED minion is done speaking. One time I was able to buy myself a chocolate cheesecake after hearing one too many “data chats can lead to more rigorous expectations which can only ensure a more positive work climate” for the young learner whom obviously has to be guided in the right direction through a series of useless acronyms and reformy paths of destruction.
Here is some bingo cards you can use during Professional Development
http://40ishoraclereflections.blogspot.com/2011/05/ed-lingo-bingo.html
2011??
Need some updates!
Corporate reformer’s language= Gobblish
Now that’s funny!
It is not ignorance that makes deformers speak that way, though they are indeed ignorant of anything that matters in maintaining education, democracy, society, and civilization. It’s the deliberate and studied obfuscation of the grifter’s spiel.
Jon Awbrey: I agree.
RheephormSpeak can be thought of as verbal jiujutsu used to disarm, confound and maim supporters of a “better education for all.”
And the point of the edufrauds who use a “grifter’s spiel” is to score the highest on the only metric that matters to them: $tudent $ucce$$. That, and only that, makes ₵ent¢ to them…
As others have noted in this thread, RheephormSpeak also seeks to enhance the stature of edupreneurs and edubullies and educrats, in large part by belittling and demeaning those who are earnestly striving to preserve that pillar of a democratic society called “public education.”
Taking these smug know-it-alls down a notch or two is an important step in blocking and overturning their toxic plans. That is why I coined the phrase “unfettered greed will answer every need” to describe their more prosaically labelled “free market fundamentalism.” The same with “laughter is poison to the pompous”—just to remind us that once you puncture their hugely inflated egos and grossly exaggerated sense of self and competence, you find that (as Gertrude Stein put it) “there is no there there.”
You can’t go wrong with Mark Twain on this point:
“Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.”
Add in an astute observation by an old dead French guy:
“No problem can withstand the assault of sustained thinking.” [Voltaire]
And—voilà!—you have this thread.
And your comments. Thank you.
😎
In other news …
Word Of The Day from the Gibberish Glossary —
“Family Farmer”
Translation: Koch Family
Colin McEnroe’s piece is just wonderful! LOVE this!
I love this!!!!!
Brilliant article. Jargon isn’t the root of the problem, though. It’s the way it’s used, and overused. It looks like this Stefan Pryor fellow is either up to no good, or in way over his head. I’d say it’s probably both.
The writer made a nice point with the Hardy Boys. That’s where the best learning happens–between kids and the things they’re drawn to. The “reformers” (and a lot of well meaning educators, unfortunately) are bent on separating the two. (See John Dewey, Stephen Krashen, Alfie Kohn, Donald Graves, et al.)
Pryor is the CT Commish of Education. He is a lawyer with no teaching experience. He was, however, one of the founders of a New Haven and Hartford charter school chain called Achievement First. Talk about a fox guarding the henhouse.
This is off-topic but I thought it was interesting. It’s superintendent opposition to Scott’s ed budget in FL.
Some of the most vehement critics were from “Republican counties” 🙂
One big objection is the inequitable treatment of charter schools v public schools on facilities maintenance funding. The money allotted to charters is huge, although they serve fewer than 10% of the state’s students.
I think it’s great the gutting of ed funding under reformer governors is finally being discussed. They’re starving public schools.
http://www.tampabay.com/news/education/k12/school-superintendents-say-gov-scotts-proposed-education-budget-does-not/2164174
My temperature enhanced caffeinated beverage just fast tracked its way through my nasal passage.
TAGO!
Love it!!
The moment they say what they mean is the moment they reveal themselves to all the world as the predators that they are. Language is always the first thing to be corrupted by corrupters.
Pitch perfect satire – that’s sadly true – but I have one minor quibble: he should have been reading Federal Reserve Bank minutes (no joke: David Coleman makes a point of recommending them as “informational text”) rather than The American Scholar.
On a more serious note, dead language is typical of authoritarian regimes (and so-called education reform is authoritarian and little else) and is intended to short circuit thought, debate and potential opposition.
If forced to actually speak English in order to say what their intentions are, these people would be pelted off the stage.
Michael Fiorillo, your comment reminds me of George Orwell’s classic essay “Politics and the English Language,” where he explains that authoritarians use words to disguise their purposes, and as you say, if the so-called “reformers” spoke plainly, they would be “pelted off the stage.”
In that essay, Orwell translates Ecclesiastes,
“The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but time and chance happeneth to them all”
as
“Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities as no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, as a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account,”
and he gives some examples of political language (e.g., “pacification” for killing every man, woman, child, and beast in an area and sowing it with toxic waste so that nothing will live there again for hundreds of years)
Romney lost the last election because he was being recorded when he was speaking plainly to investors, uh, supporters.
Well, we could call that eduspeak what it is: BULLSHIT.
I feel a dictionary of Deformy English coming on.
Common: base, low, vulgar)
Core: indigestible; syn.: from the core, or pit
State: of the Leviathan, the totalitarian regime, top down
Standards: specifications for invariant, rigidly controlled outcomes; the bullet list to which education is to be reduced (see Powerpointing)
C.C.C.C.R.A.P.: Common Core College and Career Readiness Assessment Program
PARCC: CCRAP spelled backward
C.C.C.C.M.T.: Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth (MiniTru)
Coleman, the: (weights and measures), a measure of co-incidence of arrogance and ignorance
DEFORMY MAGIC: (brand name), cure-all, magic elixir for ending failure (see failure)
failure: what schools in the United States have been doing
bee eater: unqualified sociopath in position of authority
radical: one who supports the imposition of top-down authority by oligarchs via the state
charter school: mechanism for diverting funds and the best students from public education and enriching the cousins, siblings, and golfing buddies of well-placed politicians and bureaucrats
public-private partnership: backroom deal; more generally, any mechanism for subverting or circumventing democratic processes
Secretary of Education: wind-up toy for plutocrats
union: universal scapegoat (see, however, AFT and NEA)
AFT and NEA: propaganda ministries of the Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth
Race to the Top: mechanism for coercing compliance with the Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth just within the legal limits of federal law prohibiting involvement of the Department of Education from mandating curricula
plutocrat: one who has no seat whatsoever at the policy table (definition from Arne Duncan)
data chat: local-level meeting to enforce the will of the Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth; see waterboarding
inBloom: cradle-to-grave repository of all information about citizens, including disciplinary records, psychological records, cognitive and affective responses; see Total Information Awareness
computer-adaptive curricula: worksheets on a screen keyed to responses in the inBloom database and to the bullet list of standards from the Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth; replacement for teachers
virtual school: school in which costly, difficult-to-control teachers have been replaced by computer-adaptive curricula (Teaching, there’s an app for that)
learning: mastery of the bullet list
teaching: punishment and reward via summative testing and feedback delivered to students via computer-adaptive worksheets on a screen
rigor: difficulty purposefully placed in the way of students
complex text: text that is intentionally beyond the ability of a student
readability: what a Lexile tells you, a determination based on word frequency and sentence length (e.g., Dylan Thomas’s “Time held me green and dying” is 1st-grade reading level)
education reform: see edufad
Common Core: Common name for Son of NCLB, aka NCLB Fright Night II: The Nightmare Is Nationalized
teacher: pimply adolescent from a wealthy private school given five weeks of training prior to spending two years doing Great Grates with dark-skinned children before going on to their real jobs in investment banking; (Archaic usage: whiny union members with ersatz degrees from education schools responsible for failure)
The Bell Curve: the Education Deform bible
“Unpack the standards”: Arrive at a professional development meeting and be given a list of standards with incomprehensible explanations. The teacher will then be afraid to ask for a translation into common English and have a fervent but useless wish for a decoder ring.
Argh! They are busily “unpacking” the math standards in my local district.
forgive the typos in my hastily compiled list!
technocratic Philistinism: replacement for quaint old values of humane scholarship and research, teaching and learning
Student achievement – bubbling in the correct code; a feather in the cap of deformers
Deck: Powerpoint slides used to gamble with kid’s lives.
Don’t forget New York’s contributions:
Bootstrapping – the process of introducing increasingly difficult texts on the same topic in order to improve reading skills.
Surfacing – the act of deriving a topic from an informational text.
“getting better at getting better in our practice” – improving our teaching?
Humans – not students or children or teenagers or adults or people or persons or individuals- just use a word devoid of emotional appeal and respect.
“Thoughtful people are over Piaget. They’ve moved on to Vygotsky.” Yup, a NYSED official really said that this week.
surfacing
That’s a new one on me. I actually like it. It’s a lovely, concrete metaphor with lots of appropriate associations, a little poem in itself! 🙂
Best. Post. Of. The. Week!
This sounds exactly like the last 3 in services I’ve been to..aaaaaaaah!
Dear Mr. McEnroe,
I remember the business phrase “leaner and meaner” being used by corporations during the 1980s, as a way to keep profits up (or avoid takeover) and to wrest concessions from employees.
By the 1990s this phrase was worming its way into education, as a way to encourage contract concessions from teachers and for corporations to sniff out any areas in public schools that might be ripe for profit taking, usually in the areas of custodial, secretarial, and transportation, where corporations promised to either free school districts from employee contracts and/or promise to provide those services cheaper.
By 2000, the corporate world was supplying administrators with their jargon, and principals passed it along to teachers. Schools would become defacto corporations. So with the camel now in the tent and supported by politicians, corporations could then substitute themselves for public schools.
As to the jargon itself. Besides, as others have noted in this post, strikingly similar to the language of hucksters, it is a little like spell casting, using imaginative words and phrases to influence the spellbound. Rather than being dumbstruck, we need to laugh, point a finger, and say something like, “Satan, reveal thyself!”
Great post, donasonora! And a special “thank you” to Colin for great work!!!
Outstanding and hilarious.
I laughed out loud several times throughout this thread. Thanks for the fun at the end of a tough week!
I’m sorry, folks, but TE is right about this one. Education has been one of the most jargon-ridden of professions for a long time now. And there’s something very interesting about what happens when educators borrow a term. Quite commonly, people in education half hear a term and adopt it with a bizarrely twisted and devolved denotation. Let me give some examples.
In standard English, a strategy is any OVERALL plan made in order to achieve a large, OVERALL objective, like winning a war or launching a product successfully. In EdSpeak, a strategy is any trivial thing that a student does, like looking for a context clue, making a chart, repeating a word a couple times, etc. In standard English, those are called tactics, but whoever first adopted this term into EdSpeak probably thought that strategy sounded more impressive.
In standard English, a benchmark is a numerical measure of acceptable performance. For example, a bunch of hard drives might be studied to see how many operations they can perform before they fail. An acceptably high number of operations might be set as a benchmark (number of operations to failure) against which one’s own hard drives can be measured. In EdSpeak, a benchmark is ANYTHING done somewhere in the middle of things to see how things are going. For example, a benchmark test is a test given sometime between the pretest and post test.
In standard English, readability is a complex set of attributes that varies from one person’s interaction with a text to another’s, as in,
“What did you think of Infinite Jest?”
“Well, I thought it was long but quite readable.”
In EdSpeak, readability is a measurement that reduces the complexity of a text to a number, typically via a formula based on average word frequency and average sentence length. Example: “Dylan Thomas’s line ‘Time held me green and dying’ has a first-grade readability as per the Lexile Analysis.”
In standard English, tenure is lifetime job protection that ensures the academic freedom necessary to combat undue outside prior restraint on inquiry, critique, scholarship, and teaching. In EdSpeak, tenure is minimal due process, and even that is too much for the oligarchs who believe that members of the ruling and managerial classes should have absolute power to make whatever decisions they choose to make regarding the lives of others.
As these examples illustrate, in many, many cases, in EdSpeak, a useful, fairly precise term becomes extraordinarily vague and less useful (except for misdirection), and often, as in the case of tenure, the vagueness is intentional–is introduced in order to mask an underlying ugliness, as when collateral damage is used to describe killing civilian babies, toddlers, grandparents, etc.
Of course there’s also just a lot of bloat–puffer fish talk:
In standard English, people think. In EdSpeak, they do inferencing.
I do not mean, by my comments above, to disparage Lexiles and other readability formulas, for these are quite useful. However, their limitations have to be recognized. A short story with a lot of dialogue will typically get a low Lexile score because of the short sentences and fragments that appear in conversation. Longfellow’s “Midnight Ride of Paul Revere” scores at a graduate school level.
Touche!
I won’t disagree with you. However, there is a difference between Edspeak and Reformspeak, one of which, in my opinion, is the incessant repetition of the terms. “Rigor” is a prime example. There are, apparently, no synonyms for it, and there are no topics of conversation in which its utterance is inappropriate.
I agree! Edspeak may have a great deal of jargon and its own special brand of pretention, but reform-speak has a special purpose. It’s attempting to make people who are not educators sound smarter than the people they are trying to control, and disparage. Reform-speak has the tinge of manipulation. You see so many principals using terms like “robust” and “rigor” with equal alacrity because they are vague enough to weave into any purpose. As is the way of euphemism, this allows administrators and politicians (that may be redundant) to avoid taking any ownership for implementing flawed policies that are clearly undermining.
rigor mortis always comes to mind
Well said, Cynewulf and James!
Yes, yes! Any profession will have its own jargon; education was no different.in the 1970s-80s. Once we hit the 90s, a few things happened IMO.
Business and education started to form “partnerships” and conservative think tanks started to talk louder about the “free market” in education (vouchers, choices). The conservative business interests also believed schools needed improving using a business model (cut costs, less regulation, and less govt bureaucracy [school management/services]).
Some district/school administrators started to view their role as one of a corporate manager, with a school as a “business”. Where past superintendents and principals would put students first, the new bottom line became money. And the search for more money (finance) often ended at the doors of businesses or foundations aligned with business.
By the time of NCLB, principals and superintendents would learn to adopt corporate language and practices to reform education. Didn’t have an MBA? Didn’t matter, because you could sound like you did.
It’s a great pity. Rigor is, or was, a wonderful word. It is commonly used in mathematics and logic as a synonym for “capable of being proof checked, derivable from the axioms of a formal system.”
It’s amusing, of course, that the term is being used to describe something as nebulous as “in line with the extremely vaguely and often widely inaccurately characterized skills that make up the bullet list in the CC$$ for ELA.”
The use of the term is in keeping with the general deform modus operandi, which is to claim rigorousness for any procedure that culminates in a number, graph, or table, however spurious that procedure might be. The intent is to claim for things like arbitrarily choosing the cut scores for exams or massaging the raw-to-scaled-score conversion tables for a test the “rigor” of something like Euclid’s proof that there is an infinite number of primes. We can’t be wrong. We have the data! LOL.
The devoling of the meaning of “rigor” is yet another example of how in EdSpeak, and in particular, in that dialect of EdSpeak known as Reformish (or Gobblish, as Ken Watanabe has so aptly christened it), a precise term is borrowed from some other field of human endeavor and used to create a false impression of technical precision and inevitability.
cx: wildly, not widely, of course
Janine and Robert: I think “huh” is a very powerful and frequently fruitful question applicable to both abstruse language and empirical claims that are not supported with empirical evidence. Gibberish afflicts many aspects of public policy debates.
Any particular candidates claims for application of your principle there, Bernie? 🙂
candidate claims (singular, not plural; excuse the typo)
this entire country has an aversion to plain speaking, if you ask me… in New Zealand we have a saying: “bullshit baffles brains”… and there sure is a lot of BSing going on, coming from the plutocrats and wending its way down the line…. its used as an exclusionary device and to bamboozle, hide the emptiness behind the words or the intent to deceive, manipulate, exploit….
This is spot-on! My favorite gibberish du jour is on Tennessee’s rubric for a new writing assessment that is part of Common Core/PARCC. Students read an article and write an Analytical Summary (I confess that I am not sure how this differs from a regular summary). Then, they read another article and write an essay that analyzes both articles. Of course, we are supposed to teach this skill and administer the test in English classes, even though the articles are about Social Studies or Science. But, I digress. The kicker is this phrase that appears all over the rubric: “In response to the task and stimuli, the writing. . .” Task and stimuli? Why doesn’t it just say the writing assignment and the article? I have never called a text of any kind a “stimuli.”
My God, that is really awful, sooxie!
Sooxie,
Ha,
In NJ, the BROADIE funded reformists have established ” turnaround principles, one of which is ” REDESIGN TIME.”
Only sycophants looking to please old man Eli could talk in such idiotic gibberish and think they sound intelligent.
We should not let them speak like this without consequence. “Could you please translate” should be our standard response.
I love this blog. I totally understand and am so glad I stumbled on it this week. I now know I am not alone out here. Thanks for sharing.
Sent from my iPad
>
Kathy,
Welcome! Please pass the site on to any and all who are willing to learn truths, many times uncomfortable ones, about public education and the teaching and learning process. It truly is “a site to discuss a better education for all.”
Please post often!
Duane
Outstanding!
We need to share more of the noisome, noxious nonsense that protrudes from these Power Point-addled nincompoops. The Hardy Boys (and Sgt. Rock’s Flying Commandoes) were enough for many of us for years, and we got some education, too. Children read what they like (my boys have gone from Dave Pilkie’s Professor Poopiepants through diaries of a Wimpy Kid to many novels. And writing their own today Third grader Josh just finished an “I Survived…” His is “I Survived The Battle of the Bulge” dedicated in part to his grandfather, who served with the 44th Infantry Division back during that cold winter and the extra horrors that began on December 16, 1944. As Stephen Krashan and thousands of others remind us regularly — kids read things they like — not stuff that’s stuffed at and into them.
As usual, Chicago’s fumes are choking America, and not just the spumings from Arne Duncan and his addled speechwriters. Today, the only qualifications to be an educrat in places like Chicago are (a) an ignorance of Chicago (as I’m reporting, they are ALL from out of town at this point; ready to be deployed to another city when the Broad Foundation approves; (b) an even greater ignorance of how human children actually learn (only one of the “top” people in Chicago’s public schools bureaucracy has any real classroom teaching experience (and none of them did it in Chicago); and (c) the ability to stand up with a straight face and spout Educratese while narrativing a Power Point for the Board of Education members (all appointed and sucking up to Rahm Emanuel, the ultimate plutocrat).
But at least people can capture this nonsense and save and savor it for future generations. The proudly publish the video of their nonsense on line every month! The CPS website (cps.edu) puts these videos up month after month so the whole world can see these scoundrels spouting. Test the waters and enjoy! Try Jack Elsey (CPS “Chief Officer for Innovation and Incubation”, imported from Michigan) on why we need more charter schools for starters. Then try and locate at least one of the priceless pontifications of little Todd Babbitz (“Chief Innovation Officer”, brought to us from McKinsey) before going on to others. When Chicago Public Schools officials were asked why suddenly in 2012 Barbara Byrd Bennett (who lives in Ohio in violation of Chicago’s “residency” rule) was suddenly THE PERSON to run Chicago’s public schools (following her stint destroying the public schools of Detroit) instead of Jean-Claude Brizard (who had been working Rochester before Rahm imported him to Chicago in 2011 the obvious answer was: She gives good Power Point.
“spumings”
New word for the day, Thanks!
“She gives good Power Point”
Now I know why you used “spumings”!
Aw, shucks! If people start paying attention, we won’t be able to send Stefan Pryor to Rahm Emanuel’s Chicago School District! Who knows, maybe the educrats and reformers have hit a snag and are now on “repeat”–after all, Illinois is now getting Paul Vallas back. There are not many other places where he can go. The half-life of most of these “reformers” is cycling down.
Having said this, we parents, teachers, and concerned citizens need to take back our schools. George Schmidt is absolutely right about children’s reading habits. There is no reason to force dry “non-fiction” on 6-year-olds, and xeroxed excerpts of “relevant” fiction on everyone else. I read every Nancy Drew and my share of dreadful supermarket romances before discovering The Novel and determining that things written in French were somehow both rewarding in themselves and able to enhance what I knew in English.
Look, a new mother was recently puzzling the strange questions her kindergartner was asking her during nightly storytime. She couldn’t figure out why he wanted to know if what she was reading was fiction or non-fiction (they live in a well-heeled and wealthy suburb that has embraced the CCSS). I explained to her the completely unnecessary focus that the common core places on “non-fiction” and we realized that this kindergarten teacher was struggling to explain fact and fiction to a bunch of 5-year-olds. This mother said that her son announced that he wanted to hear his favorite Paddington Bear stories, stating confidently that this was non-fiction–because the family had visited England, seen Paddington Station, and that was a “real” “factual” place.
His wise mother was quite happy with this revelation.
The poetry and innocence of children will save us, if we will only let them.
Sorry. Todd Babbitz is Chicago’s “Chief Transformation Officer” Jack Elsey is the guy on top of “Innovation and Incubation”…
And then there is the all-important STEM stuff, but that’s for another time. It’s hard to keep track and appreciate all of these guys and gals as they are imported from everywhere but Chicago and given titles that only Lewis Carroll, Joseph Heller, or maybe Kurt Vonnegut could have thought up…
For anyone that is interested in reading more on this topic, this is a good book:
http://www.amazon.com/Death-Sentences-Management-Speak-Strangling-Language/dp/1592402054/ref=la_B001HOL2LE_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1391860585&sr=1-2
The interesting thing is that the author received reams of letters from individuals saying “Thank God.” There are a lot of people frustrated with this dispassionate, dead, and content-free language.
Thanks for this! It looks very good…
Death Sentences! LOL!
Sadly, this style educational gibberish exactly how our superintendent writes his weekly newsletter. I thought I was the only one who noticed the obfuscation tactics in his ‘foam of words’. But more likely I’m the only one who reads his posts. Even sadder, I see myself in the hapless Ms. Vick who pushes her 4th grade students to read above their ability and interest level, and insists they look for ‘deeper meaning’ while they analyze and compare texts. The result of this new wave of ‘educational reform’ is going to be a whole generation of people who will think of reading as something akin to dental surgery.
At least real dental surgery is a constructive activity.
Funny and nostalgic! Sounds like Common Core. Can your Kindergartner iterate?
I sure hope not!!!
The most awful vocabulary seems to be coming out of these Public Administration degrees that all of these TFAers are getting scholarships to receive. Remember when talking “around” something meant one was never getting to the point and discussing the real issue at hand? Well now they say they are going to “collaborate around” a topic.
Which actually speaks to the truth because all they do is talk, talk, talk…
Esoteric diarrhea.
I’ve got a background in writing, research, journalism, marketing, public relations… used to get paid highly for convincing people to come and do something, change something, buy something blah, blah, blah….
My most successful projects were ones where the clients – sometimes major companies/government institutions – would allow me to use the most basic vocab and sentence structure to convey their message…. the no-frills KISS principle (which was/is ALWAYS my recommendation, but which many rejected cos they had succumbed to the lie that value/effectiveness lies in quantity rather than quality)…
My strategy with ed reformers is to keep pulling them back to that KISS idea…. to get them to deconstruct the language they are trying to use to manipulate us to reveal its real, hidden meaning…. and then to use logic to point out the glaring inconsistencies, inequalities, fallacies between their words and actions…. they get really, really pissy when you force them to drop their shielding and stand naked, so to speak!
I could see us winning this battle by using (as part of a larger strategy) a national KISS campaign in media and person-to-person to call out the misinformation, the real motivations and the actual consequences of ed reform…. We could spread the “ed reform dictionary idea” far and wide…. and we could do a “so what you’re REALLY saying is…..” campaign…. say images of someone saying something in “reform-speak”, with a plain basic english translation running beside or underneath…. and then showing the consequences of what is really being proposed… billboards, movie theatre ads, radio spots, youtube videos going viral, articles in various professional publications and parent magazines, do fun things a la the Monty Python Ministry for Silly Walks – have a ministry for reforminess… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqhlQfXUk7w
people are not stupid…. they get that there is something being hidden by the language being used, that they are being conned in some way – they feel it… they know huckstering is going on…. but perhaps they are intimidated, thinking that they are “just” parents, the community, that they have no expertise in education, that these people are the “experts”, that maybe they dont really understand what’s being said by these experts so will trust that it’s OK, that other people are accepting this stuff so it must be OK, that other people will deal with it… maybe its fear that their kids are indeed being disadvantaged in some way, and so they take the rhetoric on board…. maybe they take it onboard because this same kind of huckstering happens in most of life now, from the very highest levels of society/government down to the lowest, most mundane sales of goods and services…
anyway…. random ideas – plenty more where that came from thanks to years of marketing and PR consultancy….. pity I dont have the resources/access to put them to use on behalf of parents and teachers…
We need to be confident enough to say “huh?”
You said a LOT there, Janine!
yes, yes, yes!
I called in about 41 minutes in to ask why none of the elite school were jumping on board the CCCS. He did not answer my question. I was also bewildered as to the homogeneity of the panel. Why is ‘ed reform’ such a boys’ club. Must be something to do with the ‘over feminization’ of schools Dr. Steve Perry is worried about?
http://atthechalkface.com/2014/02/01/advertisement-attend-our-school-and-avoid-the-commoncore/ Prep schools in New England and NYC are offering affluent parents ‘the cure for the common core’, appealing to their concern that the standards privilege breadth or depth and critical thinking.
“the cure for the common core”
This is, indeed, what we need; alternatives. Unfortunately, the public schools are easy for the deformers to take over because of the top-down authority structures in place.
The speakers of Reformish, aka Gobblish, wish to control the language that we use to talk about teaching and learning. We need to wrest that away from them, for the sake of our students.
Centralized, top-down systems like that being imposed by the Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth (MiniTru) are almost always going to be exponentially more stupid than are the actions, decisions, creations, false starts, revisions, rethinkings, kludges, and so on made by large numbers of independent (autonomous) agents.
This is the difference between an ecology and a monoculture. The deformers are trying to impose a monoculture on U.S. K-12 education. We should do everything in our power to stop that, for it will INEVITABLY lead precisely to the opposite of what some among the deformers are trying to “Achieve.” It will lead, inevitably, to mediocrity, to dumbing down.
And, of course, centralization has many, many other pitfalls–corrupt manipulation by those at the controls, for example.