Candor and straight talk are rare in education, and euphemisms abound, observes Maureen Downey, the education columnist for the Atlanta Journal and Constitution. At one level, the jargon can be amusing, such as the habit of referring to one of the buildings at her son’s school as the cottage. “Personally, I would describe the place where fifth-graders attend class as a trailer,” Downey writes. ”But then, I’m not an education professional.” More seriously, she notes that happy talk and edubabble contribute to parental mistrust of schools.
My husband and I once had a 10-minute sidewalk chat with a school consultant working at a local elementary school. After a conversation about psychometrics, scaffolding, formative assessments and zone of proximal development, we walked away asking one another, “What was she saying?” The use of education jargon serves as a defense mechanism, to keep parents at bay and to establish from the onset who is the expert and who is the amateur. It becomes a way to silence questions and squelch opposition.
Downey wonders if ”beleaguered and scapegoated” educators can afford to be honest and forthcoming. ”If principals admit to unhappy parents that a new teacher is not proving effective,” she points out, ”they may also have to tell those parents that they’re stuck with the teacher anyway, since it’s not an easy task to replace staff midyear.”
I’d never heard “cottage” before. The universal phrase here is “portable.”
I think a lot of ed jargon is more short-hand than euphemism — somebody uses a term — whether “cottage” or “portable” — and everyone else jumps on board and all of a sudden you’re speaking a language no one else understands.
Downey: “The use of education jargon serves as a defense mechanism, to keep parents at bay and to establish from the onset who is the expert and who is the amateur. It becomes a way to silence questions and squelch opposition.”
Much as the use of lawyer jargon makes people think they need attorneys to help with their legal needs– or why nurses say “cerebrovascular accident” or “CVA” instead of “he had a stroke.” It may be off-putting, but it represents a valid educational shorthand. Teachers should know (and be able to explain to parents) the difference between a formative assessment and a summative assessment– and how they are now used to evaluate performance, in a field now driven by, well, psychometrics.
While I am appreciative of Downey’s point–and have always tried very hard not to alienate parents with educationese– there’s a touch of irony here. For decades, economists and public policy professionals have labeled education a field with a weak core of technical knowledge, dominated by soft skills and an imprecise vocabulary. But when teachers try to demonstrate their fluency with current tools and concepts, they’re accused of not being… what, friendly? Does Downey need to have terms like “zone of proximal development” dumbed down to feel comfortable?
I’m with the other commentators. I have experience with both economics and engineering, a lot of my job involves translating between the two, and while both disciplines use a lot of jargon, it’s because it’s necessary. I remember attending a writing course with a lot of economists and the instructor told us not to use “asymmetric information”, instead say “we don’t know”. Immediately the more out-going members of the group, including me, said “But asymmetric information doesn’t mean ‘we don’t know’, it means that one side of the transaction has relevant information that the other side doesn’t.”
Jargon may “become a way to silence questions and squelch opposition.” But it’s also a way of referring to ideas that everyday language is insufficiently precise about but that need to be handled carefully to do a job properly. If teaching was a low-skill profession such that any warm body up the top of the classroom was as good as the best teacher in the world at it then use of jargon could be only regarded as a barrier. But it seems fairly clear to me that teaching effectively is as demanding as what other professionals like doctors or engineers do. We should expect teaching jargon just like we get medical and engineering jargon.
One question — are the commenters above the exception or the rule?
Does the average teacher truly understand the jargon, or not, and instead, as the columnist suggests, use language as both a defense and self-promotion mechanism?
My sense is that a small number of teachers who have no idea what they are talking about use jargon SO frequently that it makes it seem like there are a lot of such teachers.
I find that ed jargon often obfuscates. I have attended many PLC (Professional Learning Community) meetings, where, after tossing around buzzwords like “Smart goals” and “benchmarks” it becomes impossible to track down the referent of participants’ use of “this” and “that” and “it”. “What the heck are we talking about?” I want to scream. One of my favorite bits of jargon is RTI –short for “Response to Intervention”. Still puzzled? Literally, doesn’t this mean, “Response to response”? It took me a while, but I finally figured out that this boils down to differentiated instruction coupled with tons of testing and pull-outs of kids who persistently lag. In plainer English, it means that each teacher runs a one-room schoolhouse in his classroom. Unfortunately, I don’t encounter many teachers, even English teachers, who seem to have a healthy wariness of jargon –who understand its capacity to obfuscate, to make the meaningless seem meaningful, and the plain seem complicated.
Every field has its own “language”, or shorthand, but it is also possible to use language to deliberately mislead the audience. The education sector has often been guilty of this.
Parents have recognized for years that phonics instruction is more effective than whole language. I have seen transcripts of school workships that specifically instruct teachers to say “of course, balanced literacy includes phonics”, which is deliberately dressing a whole language approach in a phonics costume, to decrease parent complaints. A reading approach that tells kids to look at the pictures and for context clues is absolutely not phonics instruction. I’ve also heard the same kind of approach used against other things parents would like schools to teach. It’s a deliberate effort to mislead people and deflect criticism of the schools.
One of my favorite examples of obfuscatory language is the use of “credit recovery” and “reading recovery.” If you recover something, you get back something that’s lost or missing. In both cases — the ability to read for comprehension and earning high school credits — what’s going on is not recovering something lost, but something the student failed to obtain in the first place.
“Response to Intervention” and “Reading Recovery” are program names, attached to specific training models. You might argue that they are misleading names–but you can’t call them something else, just as you can’t call “America’s Choice” by another name, even if it’s clearly not the choice of Americans (or even teachers). Probably the most common bit of obfuscatory language in the last eight years is “No Child Left Behind” (with runners-up “highly qualified teacher” and “Reading First”).
Even if these are thoroughly disingenuous labels, teachers should being using them daily when talking to parents–because one of teachers’ more important responsibilities is explaining why they do things, why particular lessons were selected or tests were mandated. That’s not silencing questions–it’s explaining to parents why things are different when they were in school.
This would be an amusing discussion on deceptive or supercilious speech if there weren’t an underlying snarky implication that teachers are exceptionally guilty of this (compared to other professions). Everyone uses speech–shaded language, complicated terminology–to achieve certain goals: to impress, to coerce, to entice, to persuade, to explain. Teachers have an obligation to be as clear as possible when speaking and avoid jargon. But so do engineers, dentists and cosmetologists (excuse me, aestheticians).
Here are a few of the many words that educators ought to be able to use fluently and explain to students and parents: back to basics, value-added, grade inflation, learning disability, accountability, standards-based learning, scaffolding, inquiry. And, of course, “core knowledge.”
TPR, ZPD, BICS, CALP, RI, ULSS, all just complicating the easy to understand.
Here’s a bit of an embarrassing reality in many Massachusetts public schools. There was often a bit of a rift between regular and special education. Neither party seemed to care for or appreciate the other. It was exacerbated exponentially when special education withheld servicing kids until October 1 and terminated student services on Memorial Day weekend. Of curse it was never reflected that way in student IEPs. The excuse was always re-evals, testing, etc. – as if classroom teachers had nothing to do the first and last month of the school year. Sped teachers were of course simply following orders (of sped administ). Also contributing to the divisive atmosphere was the jargon thrown around by sped teachers. It was their form of knowledge and as we all know knowledge is “power.” Bottom line, most classroom teachers worked their butts off and most sped teachers tried to get away with doing as little as possible (and were quite successful). Sped teachers would routinely show up to class and ask the ‘teacher,’ “What would you like me to do today?” That’s code for no preparation, just show up like some glorified para-professional. Talk about degrading the teaching profession.
The interesting aside – most sped teachers wound up as classroom teachers within two to three years. Guess the challenging clientele got to many of them.
Oh, the beauty of retirement. No more petty in-house BS.
Any professional should understand the language of his or her field and be able to translate it into lay terms. And that is part of teaching.
That said, I am not sure that educational jargon is necessarily the language of the teacher’s field. What about the language of the subject matter?
It seems subject matter language should come first, and then the language of the system. It seems the reverse is often the case.
Some of this might have to do with another article posted by Core Knowledge:
http://www.coreknowledge.org/blog/2009/06/02/whats-he-got-that-i-aint-got/
Our lack of “rich, deep academic content” in education results in a paltry vocabulary. I’m affected as well. Someone used the word ‘obfuscate’, which was pleasantly intriguing although unknown to me. And I’m teaching America’s children. uh-oh.
I am a teacher, and for years I have thought that many of the acronyms and what I call “teacherese” could be eliminated in favor of just plain English. This article confirms my view even more. Perhaps the educational experts feel more validated by coming up with terms that are specific to their field of expertise, (it may boost their self esteem), but as for me, and I suspect lots of others, there ARE easier, more clear ways to express most of the ideas these folks come up with in layman’s terms. Now whether many of these ideas are WORTH expressing is another subject, but come on! Let’s use English here. After all, (and I surely do NOT mean to demean the teaching profession when I say this) teaching is not rocket science. Let’s not complicate further the very real problems we have concerning educating our young people in the country by unnecessarily overblown language.