best of myshortpencil

Originally posted May 2, 2002

Resource: Evaluating
Schools: Verbal Judo Section

The
following article appears at Education
Week. It is a perfect example of how some educators use language as a
defensive weapon. The game is all about delay. Teachers and administrators know
if they can just get to the next grading period, or the next break, or the next
vacation, 99% of the issues die because it’s too late to do anything about it.

There are some straight shooters in education. For others, you need to know how
educators use language to disrespect parents. It may not sound disrespectful,
but answers that are less than fully truthful and accurate, and answers that are
evasive, are disrespectful no matter how polite they may sound.

Add,
"You’re
not being balanced" to the list.

Edu-Speak
By Daniel Wolff

In the constantly shifting, highly verbal world of public education, parents are
at a distinct disadvantage. As soon as your child enters kindergarten, you
recognize that the people in the school buildings speak a different language. By
your first teacher’s conference, you may recognize that they’re talking about
your child, but, between the abbreviations (CAT tests) and the technical terms
("decoding skills"), you begin to doubt your … well, your own
decoding skills.

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For the last decade, I’ve been involved in a grassroots community group in New
York state, Nyack Partners in
Education, or PIE, organized as an alternative to the local PTA. We’ve
raised issues the traditional parent groups have avoided— from racial
inequities in the school system to questionable hiring practices to ineffective
reading instruction. Over the years, we’ve learned that the only way to discuss
educational issues is first to translate them out of edu-speak into English
(and, in our district, Haitian, Creole, and Spanish).

What follows is a brief overview of some common edu-speak phrases: what they
mean and when you’ll hear them. Universal as these may be, demographics do
affect the specifics, so let me briefly say that ours is a well-funded suburban
district with a diverse student population. Around 35 percent of our students
are of color—African-American, Haitian-American, Hispanic, and Asian—and
district parents range from multimillionaire investment bankers to single
mothers in subsidized housing. But everyone has heard the following expressions:

"All children can learn."

School board candidates, superintendents, education reformers, visiting
politicians: Who doesn’t use this one? Its most common application is as a
soothing verbal ointment, as in: "Our dedicated administration believes
that all children can learn." Note what it does not say—that all children
may learn. That permission is considerably harder to come by, especially
in a system that separates children by perceived ability, tracking them into
what edu-speak sometimes calls "less advanced classes." As a parent,
when you hear "All children can learn," you can safely assume that
some children aren’t—with explanations to follow.

"Parents are welcome in the building."

Variations on this phrase include "Parents must be involved in quality
education" and "Community outreach is essential." Building
principals often use this one. On a day-to-day basis, you’ll soon learn that it
really means: "Some parents are welcome in some buildings some of the
time." For example, parents are welcome in the building to Xerox worksheets
for teachers. And parents are welcome in the building for the traditional
cookie- bake fund-raiser. But when PIE, our Nyack group, organized 30 volunteers
to read aloud to children, they were not welcome. The program was arranged with
the principal and teachers through the shared-decisionmaking team. But once
district employees realized this meant parents would be inside—with a chance
to see how the school worked—the program was nixed. I don’t believe ours is
the only district with a tendency to see parents as spies. In another case, a
parent volunteered three days a week to work with 1st graders. But after half a
year, someone filed a grievance with the superintendent on the grounds that this
practice might potentially threaten a teaching assistant’s job. Parents are
welcome in the building—but not for too long.

I
note that in other states, schools really do let parents and the community visit
classrooms, even without prior appointments! When they say, "Come in any
time," they mean it. Of course, they have nothing to hide.

"We know how children learn."

This one mostly comes from academics and education reformers. Often, it’s
followed by, "as the literature shows," or "best practices
prove." The "literature" is what’s printed in trade and academic
journals; "best practices" are what that literature says are working.
Almost no parents get to read this information (or could understand it if they
did).

The implication is that teaching is neither a craft nor an art, but a
science—comprehensible to experts only. Ten years ago, "we knew"
that children learned to read by using whole language. Our district, for
example, declared that if children were surrounded with good books and were read
to regularly, they would learn to decipher. But when PIE offered a writing
workshop to underachieving 8th graders, we discovered that most of these
students (1) could barely read and (2) were from low-income families. Which left
us wondering if whole language only worked with children from the district’s
wealthier, better-educated families. Now, as the pendulum swings, "we
know" that some children need the old sound-out-the-words, learn-the-rules
approach. The conclusions may vary, but the meaning stays the same: "We
know" and you, as a parent, don’t.

"Change comes from the top."

This phrase is used as common currency within the school system, where blame
tends to be shifted constantly upward with the dazzling speed of Jack’s
beanstalk. Say you discover, as we did, that the plan for shared decisionmaking
so weighted the committee toward district employees and so limited what the
committee could discuss that it was, by definition, a waste of time. First, you
go to the principal, who explains that he agrees with you, but that he’s just
doing what the assistant superintendent told him to do. The assistant
superintendent says she agrees with you and refers you to her boss, who sends
you to a school board meeting. There, your elected representatives explain that
they, too, agree with you, but this is how the state designed the plan. As a
dutiful (if weary) parent, you write the state commissioner of education,
sending a copy to the school administration. This earns you a blistering letter
from the assistant superintendent: How dare you expose the district’s dirty
linen? A few months later, you get a very sympathetic response from the
commissioner. He agrees with you. When you call his office to ask what you
should do, an assistant tells you to talk with your school board and adds,
"Let’s face it, change comes from the top." (As parents, we now
translate "shared decisionmaking" as "We, the administration will
make the decision and then share it with you.")

A list of edu-speak phrases could, of course, go on a very long time. "We
have to improve our communication skills" is a favorite among
administrators. When it turns out there’s no publicity for a meeting on how
children get into advanced classes—or when the $5,000 raise for the director
of special education is passed in private—the district will say it has to
improve its communications skills. A good rule of thumb for parents is to assume
that when you hear this phrase, you’ve stumbled on a secret.

"The key is teacher training" means that there’s nothing anyone
can do about tenure: The district is stuck with a certain amount of tired
educators. Even when training is implemented, it often isn’t the
"key." For example, after a lengthy and bitter public debate about the
achievement gap between white children and children of color, our district
instituted anti-racism workshops. Staff members, parents, and others from the
community attended, and the training was first-rate. The trouble was that there
were no follow-ups on how to implement what had been learned—or even scheduled
times for discussion groups. If this training was the "key," it was
never tried in the lock.

Then there’s "individualized learning," which means each child
ought to be taught in the way he or she learns best. This is a "best
practice," but no teacher with 20 or 30 children in class can realistically
implement such an approach.

"The solution to public education is simple: money." That
translates into: "Pay for small class size, and I’ll give you
individualized instruction." (Or, "We’re doing the right thing; we
just need to do it more intensely.") In our district, we spend an
astonishing $14,000 per student; our teachers’ average salary is $70,000; and
our middle school test scores were so low the state demanded an improvement
plan.

Finally, there’s "We agree with your goals but not your methods."
PIE has heard this one a lot, especially after the district’s racial achievement
gap appeared in a front-page story in The New
York Times. The district responded by agreeing that all children can
learn. If it had given any other impression, it had to improve its
communications skills. What’s more, with enough money put into teacher
training, the district could start the kind of top-down change that
would provide individualized training. Which is, we know, how children
learn. Oh, and the district welcomed parents to help work on this
solution.

So, what was wrong with our methods? After years of frustration, we had gone
public with issues about public education. We had, literally, spoken out of
school—instead of sticking to the private language of edu-speak.

Daniel Wolff is a parent of two and has been involved in educational reform
for more than a decade. He lives in Nyack, N.Y.