In this post, Peter Greene reviews Edspeak and Doubletalk, the glossary co-written by me and Nancy Bailey.
This is the book you need, the scorecard, to identify the players in the fast-moving world of reform propaganda and over-hyped programs.
This resulting book, Edspeak and Doubletalk: A Glossary to Decipher Hypocrisy and Save Public Schooling, is exceptionally useful as a quick-reference resource. If you are a regular reader of this or other education blogs, you know that there is a forest of acronyms, a Grand Canyon’s worth of program names and purposes, and enough different edu-focused organizations to pave a road to the moon and back. This book makes for a quick and easy reference for it all, and more. Chapters are organized by general topic, such as Charter Schools and Choice, English Language Learners, Technology, and Separation of Church and State. There are guides to the various players, both in the chapter on Groups Fighting Corporate “Reform” and School Reform Groups and Terms, or “Money Talks.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Buy it. If you have a lot of books, put it next to any George Orwell texts you might already have. And while you are at it, send a copy or at least recommend it to any PARENT who has a child in K-12. CBK
Paideia Program, or Paideia Propsal. Mortimer Adler’s proposed educational reform, which would have re-envisioned education as something happening not at the beginning of life but throughout it and having as its purpose becoming a well-rounded person, not getting a degree. His categories for school study:
Language, Literature and the Fine Arts;
Mathematics and Natural Science;
History, Geography and Social Studies;
Physical Education and Manual Training including cooking, sewing, typing, machine repair;
A general introduction to the world of work.
Adler was also instrumental in the University of Chicago Great Books program, and he had a great take on how to read a book, given in his book How to Read a Book:
Read it through first with a willing suspension of disbelief–as sympathetic a view of the author’s argument as you can muster, trying to see things from his or her point of view.
Then read it through again, critically, considering counterarguments to what the author has to say.
And Edspeak and Doublespeak–congrats, Diane and Nancy, on this important work! Here’s hoping it finds its way onto every administrator’s desk and into the hands of many politicians!!!
Adler was committed to the idea that an educated person could know a lot about everything important. His was the spirit expressed by Emerson as follows: “Give me a man who can build a great barn and a great Horatian Ode.” In the past, a bright person, a Leibniz or Goethe, could aspire to know and work at the avant-garde of many fields of human endeavor–to be close to a repository of existing knowledge. The great linguist and scholar George Steiner has a breathtaking book (a collection of essays) about, among other issues, how this has become impossible in our time, largely due to much of current work involving mathematics inaccessible to most people. His point: some things just aren’t, as a practical matter, sayable in non-mathematical language. The book is called Language and Silence. It also contains ruminations on how the Holocaust was possible, on silence as complicity, and on the inadequacy of language in the face of such horror, which challenges a fundamental notion–that high levels of cultural advancement are bulwarks against barbarism. Goebbels had a PhD in Romantic Literature from the University of Heidelberg. The officers at Auschwitz went back to their homes in the evening and listened to Schubert and Schumann and Wagner.
“Here’s hoping it finds its way onto every administrator’s desk. . .”
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ad infinitum.
It might find its way onto an adminimal’s desk. . .
. . . only to be put on the bookshelf to make it appear that the adminimal has read it.
I’ve given many a reading and/or book to quite a few different adminimals and hardly any ever read what I gave them. But it sure looked good on the shelf!
Bookcases make very good backdrops for photographs of Ed Deformers. Years ago, I worked for a famous rare book library. We had a lot of volumes from the collections of old, wealthy families–a lot of these consisted of books with pages that had never been cut, dating to the days when people had to do that (with a letter opener) to separate the signatures themselves.
Some of these books had been in wealth families’ collections for many generations. https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2014/02/28/the-limits-of-learning/
“Eduspeak relies on a cloud of smoke and fuzz to obscure what’s really going on.” –Peter Greene
Yes, and the response to Deform, at the outset, should have been, “Just what have you (Jeb Bush, Rhee, Duncan, Gates, Coleman, the Waltons, Pearson, DeVos, et al.) been smoking?”
Thank you, Diane and Nancy, for attempting to clear the fog.
Disrupter. n. One who attempts, for profit, to steal childhood from children. Syn. Deformer.