posted 01-24-2004 10:09 PM            

Teaching Disloyalty To Children - Dumbing Down Further
American Free Press.net
1-23-4

http://www.americanfreepress.net/Editorial/Ed_Issue_5_3/ed_issue_5_3.html
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ALSO:

CHILDREN FORCED TO LEARN TO SPEAK EDUCATIONESE
Jargon now regularly showing up on ests, or 'assessments'
By Linda Perlstein
Washington Post
(Printed in The Spokesman-Review 1/18/04)

At many schools, 6-year-olds don't compare books anymore--they make "text-to-text connections." Misbehaving students face not detention but the "alternative instruction room," or "reinforcement room," or "reflection room." Children who once read now practice "SSR," or "sustained silent reading." And in Maryland, high schoolers write "extended constructed responses"--the essay, in a simpler time.

Jargon has been a mainstay of bureaucracy for centuries, satirized in the works of Jonathan Swift and George Orwell, Education is particularly fertile ground: At school board meetings, stakeholders gather to align curriculum to content standards; in class, teachers vertically articulate and differentiate instruction and give authentic, outcome-based assessments.

Now--with the teacher training industry uncommonly influential, children encouraged to think in more complex terms, and new tests and reforms each coming with its own vocabulary--the vast menu of what's called eduspeak or educationese has oozed into the classrooms. A second-grade teacher announces "modeling efficient subtraction strategies" as the task of the day, while "selected response" has taken the place of "multiple choice."

"These are terms that will drive anyone to complete hystera," said Robert Hartwell Fiske, publisher of the Vocabulatry Review and author of the forthcoming "Dictionary of Disagreeable English."

"If teachers want to talk in those terms among themselves, they're welcome to--perhaps sequestered--but introducing children to them is criminal, dehumanizing," he said. "You can't have kids going around spouting this stuff."

TEACHERS SAY THEY USE THE LANGUAGE, which varies by state or district or school, because they're told to. Administrators say they use it because it's on the tests--and besides, everyone will learn it eventually. The theory also goes that if you want students to write a paragraph in a new way, you have to call it something new, too.

"Teachers are being observed more closely than ever before, and if you're not using the right jargon, you look like you don't know what you're doing--regardless of the fact that the little kids have no clue," said Jerry Taylor, a technology techer outside Rochester, N.Y., who compiles one of many school-jargon glossaries on the Internet.

Students and parents say it's hard to keep up, and outsiders say the language alienates parents, complicates learning and muddies the language.

The words change so fast, several times within a student's academic career. There are ESL (English as a second language) students of LEP (limited English proficient) students of ELL (English language learners), depending on whom--and when--you ask. The library is the media center and the librarian the media specialist and, in some schools, homeroom has become advisory or Achievement Time or even Time to Care.

Robert Maeder, 17, a senior at Springbrook High School in Silver Spring, Md., finds the terms demeaning--especially "learning cottage," instead of "classroom trailer," and "assessment" for test.

"It's like renaming a prison 'the happy fund place," Maeder said. "Tests should be called tests. 'Brief constructed response'--you just wonder why they don't say 'paragraph.' It doesn't really serve any purpose renaming them."

Jargon is used when regular words are not sufficient to connote subtle technical meanings, when people want to establish themselves as authorities--neither of which is applicable in a first-grade class, said Georgetown University linguistics professor Deborah Tannen. "I don't think it's going to hurt the kids especially," she said. "But it seems silly."

In the past year and a half, Montgomery County, Md., teachers were asked to transcribe each lesson's "essential questions" (a kindergarten example: "Why is it important to spell my own name?") straight from the curriculum guide onto the wall or worksheets.

At Laytonsville Elementary School in Gaithersburg, Md., a bulletin board that might have once announced "Our Students' Work" instead says, "Evidence of Student Learning." One recent morning, first-graders were told after a math exercise, "That was a good warm-up for showing our enduring understanding that a number represents a quantity." A teacher told fifth graders doing a social studies activity, "You will have a formative assessment when this is over."

"The kids really can learn that language. It's a new word to them whatever word you pick," said princiapl Hilarie Rooney.

But when asked the meaning of "formative assessment" and "enduring understanding," many students shrugged.

Virginia sends home literature explaining that to graduate, students need 22 "standard units of credit" (also known as "classes") and six "verified credits" (also known as "passed state exams"). Maryland mails families test scores broken into two parts: the "criterion-referenced assessment" and the "norm-referenced assessment." the former refers to how children scored on the material supposed to have been learned and the latter to how they tested against other kids, but plenty of parents have no clue about the distrinction.

Anne Henderson, a Washington D.C.-based education consultant and author of "The Family is Critical to Student Achievement," said that keeping up with language so removed from everyday life--and which, she said, teachers often can't define themselves--is frustrating for parents.

"It reinforces the divide between schools and families," she said, particularly for the poor and less educated. "Parents are like, 'What in the world does this all mean?'"

Steve Gibson, a Montgomery County community superintendent (de-jargoned: he oversees a group of schools), defends some of the changes. From "multiple choice" to "selected response": "What I grew up, oftentimes it was 'multiple guess,' and we don't want kids guessing, but selecting their response." From "paragraph" to "brief constructed response": "We want them to be very brief and right to the point with something they are going to construct."

But isn't it implicit that an essay is constructed?

"You and I know that, but I'm not so sure that young little people know that," he said. "My hope is that we're creating language for kids that is more explicit and to the point than it is confusing."