Sunday, August 27, 2006

The Edu-Speak Lexicon

A tip of the hat to Denis of Free Racine, who recently highlighted the absurdity of the language currently used by the Educrats of our school system; for the uninitiated, his piece is NOT an exaggeration, this is truly how they talk.

In the same vein, I will attempt to help the “ignorant” who do not understand Edu-Speak and publish a lexicon of sorts. Hopefully Mr. Racine Report Card and others will read this and keep it as a handy resource…

External Stakeholders – Parents and other tax-paying members of the community.

Internal Stakeholder – Teachers, staff and students of the school district.

Industry Standard Interface Evaluation Techniques – An example of this would be the test commonly known as MAP (Measure of Academic Progress). This test is widely used by school districts all over the country because it gives them nearly instant data, unlike the WCKE, which the results are not available for months. See systematic internal progress monitoring.

Primary Service Provider – Teacher

Random Implementation of Strategies – Currently this is the excuse of why Continuous Progress is not working in our elementary schools. In other words, it’s the teachers’ fault.

Systematic internal progress monitoring - Testing done throughout the year.

Transparent Benchmarks – Publicly stating the goals of the district.

Hopefully, this will help the “Edu-Speak challenged” understand if they should find themselves at a board meeting or presentation by Hicks and Co. Check back for more soon as I continue my quest to “break the code” of Edu-Speak.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Can you please explain and include the following terms:extrapolation, aggregated data, benchmarks, targets, metrics, quintiles and quartiles. I'm sure that there are others, but these are the terms that readily come to mind.

Free Thinker said...

As a teacher, I find the terminology frightening and irritating. It does nothing to solve any of Unified's ills and shows how misguided the district adminstration is right now.

Denis Navratil said...

Hi Brenda. FYI, I made up the term "industry standard interface evaluation techniques" because it sounded like something that they would say. I hope they don't start using my fictitious terminology, but it would be funny if they did.

Brenda said...

Denis,

You made it up? Fits right in though, don't you think?

My definition still stands, I think we should start throwing the term around on Monday nights.

Brenda said...

Randy (aka Primary Service provider),

I wish there were more teachers like you willing to stand up and call the adminstration out!

Brenda said...

Kathy,

I will work on definitions for those, but I'm sure your take on it would be much more enlightening.

Would you like to take a stab at it?

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