Of "Mush and Gibberish" and Fake Ed "Reform"

[Smarmie Doofus]

How politicians, bureaucrats and ed profiteers are perverting the language while "reforming" the schools. Really. Does this sound like "reform" to you? "Reform" implies "progress"; does it not?

Sheeeeeezzzzz. Anyway this is a great op-ed from CT. Apparently the guy's on NPR . Which is a shock in itself; hard to believe Gates would go along w. something like THAT. ( i.e. the employment of such a person by NPR.)

The argument in a nutshell: "You cannot helpfully guide education and mold young minds if your skull is full of mush and gibberish is dribbling out of your mouth."

>>>>>Education Commissioner Stefan Pryor appeared on the WNPR program "Where We Live" this week. Here are three things he said in the first seven minutes.

1. "So we decoupled the state test data from evaluation for the second year for any district that wished to decouple it. We also made some rules around creating greater assurances around the security and efficiency of data management systems ..."

2. "The model that we established for evaluation with the inclusion of teacher observations of student learning indicators to making sure that we are looking at student outcomes and other features — that was arrived at by consensus through our Performance Evaluation Advisory Council."

3. "We received a waiver to enable us to administer the Smarter Balance Assessment this year on an optional basis, and a lot of other conclusions get drawn from that including the fact


that we needed to decouple data, state data, from the evaluation system."

Deep breath. OK, several things.

When a person talks this way there are two possible causes. Either he does not know what he's talking about and wishes to hide that, or he is supremely aware of how empty his words are and wishes to hide that.

The people currently in charge of teaching English do not speak English. This is called "a paradox." Examine quote No. 1 in which the word "around" is used twice as a synonym for "pertaining to." "Around" has two prepositional meanings. "Pertaining to" is not one of them, but people use it that way nowadays to dress up their fatuous remarks.

Elsewhere in those seven minutes, Pryor described a problem and said, "We solved for that by …" No. You solve for an unknown. You solve a problem. You do not solve for a problem unless you are trying to sound smarter than the people who are listening.

I attempted — several times and in several moods — to parse and punctuate quote No. 2 so that it would be something other than a meaningless foam of words. I could not.

You cannot helpfully guide education and mold young minds if your skull is full of mush and gibberish is dribbling out of your mouth.>>>> The rest at:
http://touch.courant.com/#section/-1/article/p2p-79199774/

[liberal_at_heart]

1. K&R.

Idiots who don't know what they are doing, so they have to try and sound like they do. They say many, many words, but have no meaning.

[MineralMan]

2. Education, like many fields, has developed an extensive jargon,

that makes up much of what is said and written by educators. That's a normal thing, but it does limit communication with people who are not in that field.

Jargon also often covers up a lack of actual information to be conveyed. It can substitute for meaningful statements when used by people who don't really know what they're talking about.

I see both things in evidence in the quotes you posted.