Bob Shepherd—teacher, author, editor—is writing a dictionary of a new language called “Reformish.” Here is the current version.

Categories Education Reform

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retired teacher says:

May 13, 2019 at 9:14 am

Thanks for the Devil’s Dictionary. Maybe your next gig should be writing for John Oliver. I love your definition of real learning. I have often felt almost transported when I have read something so eye opening, so revealing, an episode of real learning.

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markstextterminal says:

May 13, 2019 at 9:15 am

Ambrose Bierce, you finally have a worthy adversary!

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- GregB says:
  
  May 13, 2019 at 9:45 am
  
  I wouldn’t go that far! 😇 This is one of my favorites from the master:
  
  POLITICS, n. A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.
  
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  - bethree5 says:
    
    May 14, 2019 at 9:53 am
    
    (re: Bierce ‘Politics’) Reminds me of something from Left Hand of Darkness: Karhide is not a nation, it’s a family quarrel.
- Laura H. Chapman says:
  
  May 13, 2019 at 9:48 am
  
  Yes. This is a wonderful wake up for my day. For a source of some more gibberish and jargon, look at the grants language for the ChanZukerberg Initiative, donor advised funds.
  Learning science will tell us what computer delivery systems will be needed for holistic whole child education… And that is just for starters.
  
  Reply
- Bob Shepherd says:
  
  May 13, 2019 at 9:52 am
  
  Two of my favorites from Bierce:
  
  ARRAYED, pp. Drawn up and given an orderly disposition, as a rioter hanged to a lamp-post.
  
  LOVE, n. A temporary insanity curable by marriage
  
  Reply
  - GregB says:
    
    May 13, 2019 at 10:05 am
    
    And (this is so much fun)…
    
    POLITICIAN, n. An eel in the fundamental mud upon which the superstructure of organized society is reared. When he wriggles he mistakes the agitation of tail for the trembling of an edifice. As compared with the statesman, he suffers the disadvantage of being alive.
  - Bob Shepherd says:
    
    May 13, 2019 at 6:15 pm
    
    Oh my Lord, Greg. That is funny!!!
GregB says:

May 13, 2019 at 10:00 am

Here’s one that was missing:

SUCCESS, n. 1) a flexible measurement adjusted according to the desired outcome of a vested interest; 2) a nefarious term for a cynical and unmitigated disaster of what is marketed as a school. Preys on hopes of parents, lines pockets of politicians and hucksters with public monies, and clouds all attempts to have accountable transparency.

Archaic: the accomplishment of an aim or purpose.

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- Bob Shepherd says:
  
  May 13, 2019 at 10:23 am
  
  Always looking for philologists willing to expand our understanding of this goblin tongue!
  
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Bob Shepherd says:

May 13, 2019 at 10:02 am

BIERCED, pp Disappeared by the powers that be after having publicly [muck]raked them over the coals

Most readers will be familiar with Bierce’s classic short story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek.” The story deserves its fame. My favorite of his stories, however, is his hair-raising “Chickamauga,” which, to my mind, belongs high on any list of the 50 finest tales ever written. It doesn’t get much better than that.

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- GregB says:
  
  May 13, 2019 at 10:09 am
  
  Shucks, I just checked YouTube and they now have the Twilight Zone episode of “Occurrence” behind a $1.99 paywall. I think it was the only episode that wasn’t an original production of theirs, it is an award-winning short from France. Well worth it if you have streaming of Twilight Zone episodes!
  
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  - Bob Shepherd says:
    
    May 13, 2019 at 10:27 am
    
    http://www.online-literature.com/bierce/992/
  - Bob Shepherd says:
    
    May 13, 2019 at 10:29 am
    
    http://www.online-literature.com/bierce/175/
Yvonne says:

May 13, 2019 at 10:18 am

Thanks for this. I laughed and boy did I need to laugh.

Good one, Bob.

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- Bob Shepherd says:
  
  May 13, 2019 at 11:24 am
  
  Thank you, Yvonne!
  
  Reply
ira shor says:

May 13, 2019 at 10:48 am

Marvelous and hilarious!

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- Bob Shepherd says:
  
  May 13, 2019 at 11:24 am
  
  Golly. Thanks, Ira!
  
  Reply
Duane E Swacker says:

May 13, 2019 at 12:54 pm

A few more:

Adminimal (n.) A. A public school administrator lacking in critical thinking skills combined with an uncanny ability to follow the herd. B. An administrator who willingly mandates and implements educational malpractices that he/she knows harms not only the teaching and learning process but also the very being of the students (see GAGA).

Going Along to Get Along (GAGA): Nefarious practice of most educators who implement the edudeformers agenda even though the educators know that those educational malpractices will cause harm to the students and defile the teaching and learning process. The members of the GAGA gang are destined to be greeted by the Karmic Gods of Retribution* upon their passing from this realm.

*Karmic Gods of Retribution: Those ethereal beings specifically evolved to construct the 21st level in Dante’s Hell. The 21st level signifies the combination of the 4th (greed), 8th (fraud) and 9th (treachery) levels into one mega level reserved especially for the edudeformers and those, who, knowing the negative consequences of the edudeformer’s agenda, willing implemented it so as to go along to get along. The Karmic Gods of Retribution also personally escort these poor souls, upon their physical death, to the 21st level unless they enlighten themselves, a la one D. Ravitch, to the evil and harm they have caused so many innocent children, and repent and fight against their former fellow deformers. There the edudeformers and GAGAers will lie down on a floor of smashed and broken ipads and ebooks curled in a fetal position alternately sucking their thumbs to the bones while listening to two words-Educational Excellence-repeated without pause for eternity.

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- Bob Shepherd says:
  
  May 13, 2019 at 3:08 pm
  
  Wonderful, Señor Swacker!!!
  
  Reply
  - Duane E Swacker says:
    
    May 14, 2019 at 6:42 pm
    
    ¡Gracias!
- Roy Turrentine says:
  
  May 13, 2019 at 7:04 pm
  
  Gadfly: n. Any of those whose Swackerian or neoswackerian complaints that filter in dissonance into the semi-conscience state of the Adminimal.
  
  Reply
  - LeftCoastTeacher says:
    
    May 13, 2019 at 7:28 pm
    
    This whole post and all the comments are hilarious, but neoswackerian made me laugh especially hard.
  - Roy Turrentine says:
    
    May 13, 2019 at 8:13 pm
    
    As an avid reader of Swacker’s work, I am working to create an application of his logic to particle physics. When I complete this I will become recognized as the originator of neoswackerianism. We all have to set a goal.
  - LeftCoastTeacher says:
    
    May 13, 2019 at 11:48 pm
    
    The standardized test scores of a Higgs boson are not an acceptably accurate measure of a molecule. I agree.
  - SomeDAM Poet says:
    
    May 14, 2019 at 10:44 am
    
    Betsy’s boson
    
    Betsy’s boson
    Lots of spin
    Seethrough clothes on
    Naught within
  - SomeDAM Poet says:
    
    May 14, 2019 at 10:49 am
    
    Boson the 🤡
  - Bob Shepherd says:
    
    May 14, 2019 at 12:56 pm
    
    Roy Turrentine: But how does one measure whether a given person is a Swackerian, a Neoswackerian, or a Postswackerian?
  - Duane E Swacker says:
    
    May 14, 2019 at 6:45 pm
    
    Bob,
    When you figure that out please let me know. But I suspect that there is no measuring such concepts. What would be the agreed upon standard unit of measure for said concepts?
  - SomeDAM Poet says:
    
    May 14, 2019 at 7:38 pm
    
    The BSwacker
    
    Duane’s a Swacker
    Of pure BS
    A BSwacker
    Is he, I guess
- SomeDAM Poet says:
  
  May 14, 2019 at 10:32 am
  
  Duane Swacker: see Noel Wilson!
  
  Noel Wilson: see Duane Swacker!
  
  Reply
Roy Turrentine says:

May 13, 2019 at 6:36 pm

Civil Rights: a concept that gives the reformer an excuse to use public money to fund a segregated school so the sons and daughters of gentrification do not have to school with the great underclass.

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- SomeDAM Poet says:
  
  May 14, 2019 at 10:38 am
  
  Bob
  
  Nice work. A dictionary of deform was badly needed
  
  Of course, one could just put NOT in front of every term they use to get the real meaning.
  
  Deformian logic, ya know.
  
  Reply
  - Bob Shepherd says:
    
    May 14, 2019 at 1:01 pm
    
    OMG! Yes!
    
    The key insight.
    
    War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. Defunding public schools provides choice. Education via computers rather than via persons is personalized education. And so on.
Wait, What? says:

May 13, 2019 at 9:20 pm

You missed #1 on their hit parade…
“Social Justice” = Redistribution of Wealth
(seriously – google it – it’s in their playbook)

and…
Equity = Robin Hood mantra

“If you build it they will come” syndrome = a.k.a. “Your dual language, early childhood, and special education programs are TOO successful. If they weren’t “those people” wouldn’t move in to the district”

Slum lord = Turncoats who rent properties to “those people”

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- SomeDAM Poet says:
  
  May 14, 2019 at 10:40 am
  
  Robbin the Hood
  
  Robbin the hood
  Of public schools
  Fillin’ with flood
  Of charter tools
  
  Out of the wood
  With his merry men
  Robbin the Hood
  Has struck again
  
  Reply
- Bob Shepherd says:
  
  May 14, 2019 at 1:29 pm
  
  Slum lord. Prole containment and resource extraction specialist.
  
  Reply
Máté Wierdl says:

May 14, 2019 at 12:38 pm

“Bell Curve, The. The Reformish Bible.”

In my experience, 99% of thios referring to the Bell curve don’t know what it is, and what it is for. Come to think of it, the understanding level could be similar to the Bible’s, so Bob’s definition is spot on.

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- Bob Shepherd says:
  
  May 14, 2019 at 1:16 pm
  
  No one is supposed to understand the math, Mate! That’s the point! It’s a black box. Deformy math is ENTIRELY BASED ON obfuscatory numerology. You point to some charts in Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve and say, abracadabra, this proves that only white people are educable. You point to some high-stakes standardized test scores and say, gazaam, this proves that American public education is a failure. Somehow, our politicians and state and federal education officials went through 12 years of elementary mathematics instruction, but it never dawns on them to say, hmmm, are these “data” valid? reliable? It’s been many years now since the emergence of epigenetics, but one still reads in the textbooks a 70-to-80 percent heritability figure for intelligence, based on now invalidated twin studies. That’s because ordinary people are supposed to be cowed by the mathematics, and, ironically, the very people crying out that “We need rigor!” build every report, every argument, every claim on bad data and specious inference from it.
  
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  - Duane E Swacker says:
    
    May 14, 2019 at 6:59 pm
    
    “. . . but it never dawns on them to say, hmmm, are these “data” valid? reliable?”
    
    Well, as Wilson shows reliability is a secondary function to validity. If something is invalid it can still be reliably invalid, as standardized tests are. Hence Wilson’s focus on invalidity in his work. For a shorter writing on invalidity issues see his “A Little Less than Valid: An Essay Review”
    
    http://edrev.asu.edu/index.php/ER/article/view/1372/43
    
    At the beginning Wilson states:
    
    “As a test maker I worked for the Australian Council for Educational Research for six years. As a result I had always regarded this book in its previous incarnations as a sort of bible, a reference of last resort. So not until I wrote my Ph D thesis on Educational Standards and the Problem of Error did I subject the 1985 version of Standards to a more
    critical analysis (Wilson, 1997). As that analysis was not overly complimentary, I thought it only fair to look at the 2002 version with similar critical gaze. As before, I focus on validity. Why? Because, as the good book says,
    
    ‘Validity is, therefore, the most fundamental consideration in developing tests (p. 9).’
    
    I concur. If the test event is not valid, if indeed the test is invalid, then all else is vain and illusory.”
  - Bob Shepherd says:
    
    May 14, 2019 at 7:19 pm
    
    Indeed. So, do the one or two multiple-choice questions on the state exam that deal with ELA standard x (choose one at random) validly test for mastery of this standard? Of course not. Two questions aren’t sufficient to measure, validly, a standard as broad as most of these are, and the standards are for the most part too vague to be operationalized enough, by any rational procedure, to be tested. And where are the independent measures of mastery of the standard to which this measurement, on the test, was correlated to demonstrate its validity? Answer: there are none. And even if the items on the test WERE valid measurements of mastery of the standard (they aren’t), does this make the test as a whole a valid test of mastery of, say, what a student of 8th-grade English should know of 8th-grade English? Well, no, clearly. Mastery of ELA at a particular grade level would involve a lot of descriptive knowledge (knowledge of what) that is entirely absent from the exams and a lot of procedural knowledge that isn’t tested either. The whole thing, in ELA, is a scam. It’s numerology. It’s pseudoscience. Anyone who doesn’t recognize this simply hasn’t thought about it much. It’s shocking, really, that English teachers and ELA officials at the state level haven’t laughed this nonsense off the national stage. That they haven’t is a shocking indictment of their independence, seriousness, and knowledge of their subject. That said, 1 in 50 English teachers will tell me that he or she approves of these standards or of the tests. Many keep silent, except among themselves, out of fear of losing their jobs. And, in fact, using the term “standards” to refer to the Gates/Coleman bullet list is ridiculous. Coleman rushed out his stupid bullet list, based on the lowest-common-denominator groupthink of existing state “standards” in order to meet the master’s call for a single national set of items to key educational software to. Any bs list would do to suit that purpose, and that’s what we got.
  - Duane E Swacker says:
    
    May 14, 2019 at 7:56 pm
    
    Well stated Robert!
    
    Was just reading this from the above referenced Wilson work: “Primarily the construct that the test measures, which in practice is the essential definition of the
    construct, as determined by the test items. And the name of the test, of course, is the
    name of the construct. The circularity of the definitions is mind boggling, and the testing discourse spirals inwards. In fact, the major source of invalidity error is not to be found in the translation of a particular test constructor’s notion of a construct into test items or other performances. Rather it is to be found in the translation of what is supposedly being measured into the construct. It stems from the lack, indeed impossibility, of clear definition in the educational or psychological world as to what in clear empirical terms is the thing to be measured, and then in the gap between this description of the required test
    taker behaviour, and the behaviour required when the test taker scores on the test. And from the point of view of the test taker, the greatest test irrelevance resides in the very form of the test itself, independent of content. Many test takers simply do not accept that this test performance is related much to what she knows, or can do. Such considerations
    are essentially excised by the narrowed and controlled definitions in the variables
    involved, such as construct, test format, and measurement error. ”
    
    I’d add that there is no measurement error because there is, in reality, no measuring being done.
  - Máté Wierdl says:
    
    May 14, 2019 at 11:34 pm
    
    “Mastery of ELA at a particular grade level would involve a lot of descriptive knowledge (knowledge of what) that is entirely absent from the exams and a lot of procedural knowledge that isn’t tested either. ”
    
    Ultimately, people who are fond of tests, implicitly or explicitly, must claim that there is science that suppports the usage of tests in education, since we want to measure something. Many people say, tests are used to measure knowledge. And I say, this is exactly where the root of the problems is: do we all agree on what is considered knowledge in a given subject?
    
    But let us assume that after months of hard work 90% of English teachers agree on what knowledge in their subject is. Then comes the question: can tests measure this knowledge? Is it perhaps the case that every test (however well designed) changes what knowledge is? But then how useful (objective) is a test which changes what it intends to measure?
  - Bob Shepherd says:
    
    May 15, 2019 at 1:07 am
    
    There’s a lot of truth to the old saw that IQ is whatever it is that IQ tests measure. We need a truth in testing policy that acknowledges this. There are some things that can be easily measured, or tested for, and some that can’t be. Do you know what the capital of Missouri is? This I can test for honestly. But if you think carefully about, say, reading, what people read, why they do it, what they need to know and be able to do in order to do it, you will recognize–anyone would–that almost all of what reading is about is not measured by these “tests of reading.” And one reason why we should disdain any top-down, invariant, persistent list of what constitutes knowledge of ELA, is that people–linguists, English professors, education professors, cognitive psychologists who study learning and language, classroom practitioners, and others–if free to do so develop ever deeper, richer notions about what “reading” is and what it means to be good at it. But something like the puerile list compiled by Coleman stops, cold, any thinking by anyone else on these matters. Worse than that, the Coleman list embodies or instantiates very primitive, one might say “folk” notions about ELA. It certainly doesn’t reflect the state of the art of thinking about the subject. Sickeningly, our curricula and pedagogy are completely tied, now, to these primitive folk ideas about literature, language, reading, etc., from the Coleman bullet list. It’s so backward. It’s as though we required teachers of medicine to use Galen and the 1858 edition of Gray’s Anatomy. Gates in effect appointed Coleman, this primitive, this philistine, the ELA Thought Police.
  - SomeDAM Poet says:
    
    May 14, 2019 at 7:56 pm
    
    Psychometricians are reliably invalid.
    
    Read this to know what I mean.
    
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_(statistics)
    
    How any thinking person can actually believe the collection of pseudoscientific makarky that they have concocted is a real mystery
    
    Their “measurement” theory is a bunch of pure BS.
  - Duane E Swacker says:
    
    May 14, 2019 at 7:57 pm
    
    Exactly SDP!
- SomeDAM Poet says:
  
  May 14, 2019 at 1:52 pm
  
  I think it would be the Bill Curve in this case, given Bill Gates prominent role in Deform
  “The Bill Curve Boys”
  
  The Bill Curve Boys
  Just love the tests
  Like favorite toys
  They tout their bests:
  
  “A perfect score on SAT
  Is what I got in school, you see
  And how successful I’ve turned out
  The test tells all, there’s little doubt”
  
  Bill Gates got a perfect SAT score according to his Wikipedia page (or at least used to report it there) What sort of adult brags about their SAT score? (or even remembers it?)
  
  Reply
  - SomeDAM Poet says:
    
    May 14, 2019 at 1:55 pm
    
    “The Colemanbot”
    
    Designed in a lab at MIT
    The Colemanbot for SAT
    Unequaled for the standard test
    Can beat Commander Data’s best
    
    “Test to the Top (TTTT)”
    (also known as “The Billionaire’s T Party”)
    
    “The measure of success
    Is score on standard test”
    Said William Gates
    Who did quite great
    On SAT, no less
retiredbutmissthekids says:

May 15, 2019 at 2:16 am

Just got back on the ‘net (was on a trip).

I’m gobswack(er)ed by this post & the comments here!

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- Duane E Swacker says:
  
  May 15, 2019 at 6:55 am
  
  Like Robert, I owe Ambrose Bierce for his cunning wordsmithing. If you haven’t read his “Devil’s Dictionary”, well, here it is:
  
  http://xroads.virginia.edu/~Hyper/Bierce/bierce.html
  
  Reply