The Joys of Educational Jargon

At Harvard recently a young graduate student asked me a tough question:

Mr. Merrow, you have been interviewing educators for 35 years. How do you know when an educator is sincere and can be trusted?

It's a great question, but before I tell you how I answered her, let me admit that, once I got back to New York, I queried other education reporters on the subject. Is there language -- jargon -- that makes you suspicious of educators, I asked?

The flood of responses surprised me. It seems that a lot of reporters have had it up to here with educational jargon. Their (non) favorites include phrases like: "at risk," "scaffolding," "value-added," "best practices," "state of the art," "laser-like focus," and "raising the bar."

For about half a dozen reporters, the absolute nails-on-the-blackboard term is "stakeholders."

I can't resist stringing together expressions, like so:

"Aligned instruction with buy-in by highly qualified teachers for authentic inquiry-based learning and student engagement in professional learning communities will produce 21st century skills in our youngsters." (And I'll bet some educator somewhere has actually said that!)

(But not in my new book, The Influence of Teachers.  I did my best to make it a jargon-free zone and will refund your purchase price if you can find examples of my -- non-ironic -- use of "educationese.")

Educators apparently adore alliteration: "Scaffolding for success," "ramp up for rigor and readiness," "data-driven," "drilling down," "authentic assessment," "teaching to the test," and "rigorous research."

Reporter Jackie Borchardt of the Casper Star-Tribune made a school board bingo card last year that included "literacy," "goal team," "rigor," "pathways," "research-based," "engaged," "high-access," "what's best for kids," "cohort," "strategic plan," and "21st century education." She didn't say whether she called out "Bingo" during a School Board meeting!

Does jargon disguise vacuity? Anne Lewis, a veteran reporter, offered this analysis: "I have come to the conclusion that it exists because of a professional lack of esteem. Other professions requiring college degrees have a specific language -- medicine, the sciences, engineering, law. But educators only have plain English, so they change it into a "professional" language that sounds fancy and inaccessible when it ought to be the most accessible profession of all."

Do some educators obfuscate because they think it makes them sound more professional? Are some educators so deep in the weeds of their profession that they have forgotten how to communicate with ordinary folks?

And are some being duplicitous, saying, "We know what works" when in fact they do not?

I suspect it's "Yes" to all of the above.

So how did I answer that young woman?

I told her that two terms make me hyper-vigilant: rigorous and ready to learn. "Ready to Learn" tells me one of two things: either the educator hasn't thought about the difference between being "ready to learn" and being "ready for school" OR she actually believes they mean the same thing. If the latter, that's remarkable arrogance. If the former, let's hope the leader can be taught the difference.

I hate it when educators talk about the need for a "rigorous curriculum" because that tells me they haven't thought much about the meaning of the adjective (harsh and unyielding). Perhaps they think it makes them sound tough, as if that were a good thing, but I associate rigor with death ("rigor mortis"). Who needs that in our classrooms? Why not say "challenging" instead?

But what I listen for are clues about beliefs. When an educator looks at a child, I want to know if he wonders, "How intelligent is this kid?" -- or is he thinking "How is this child intelligent?"

If the former, then the educator is operating from a medical model, with himself as the doctor and provider of cures. I don't like that philosophy. If the latter, he is working from a health model and is ready to build on the child's strengths.

I advised the young woman that one cannot simply ask educators which way they look at the world, because they will spit back the politically correct response. Instead, I said, watch and listen carefully. Cut through -- or even ignore -- the jargon, which at the end of the day is a nuisance and a distraction. It's the core beliefs that matter.

 

Follow John Merrow on Twitter: www.twitter.com/john_merrow

Comments

[Kronosaurus]

09:39 AM on 04/29/2011

Asif there isn't jargon in every profession. John, I think you miss the point. It's not the jargon that is problematic, it's all the different reforms, programs, movements, etc. that pervade the professional development circuit and schools of education. "Rigorous" became popular because of the perception that our curricula was too watered down. It really does make sense in the proper context. What is interesting about education jargon is how watered down it is for the masses. In other fields the jargon is annoying because it is so heavy and esoteric. And btw, "best practices" is not exclusive to the education field.

[mainah22]

01:30 AM on 04/27/2011

This must be SO frustrating to be buried in bland management-ese when there are literally hundreds of studies that suggest applied ideas that could actually improve learning!

[sidnee]

10:03 PM on 04/26/2011

This educator cannot stand all the "jargonese" that permeates all the staff meetings I attend and all the rah-rahing coming from the district. This year our district mantra is "rigor" and it annoys the h*** out of me. The year before it was "cultural diversity" which is great to say--but what does that mean in a classroom? We always talk about making things rigorous or diverse, but we never talk about what it LOOKS LIKE in a classroom. The answer to all our problems, it would seem, is to just make curriculum more rigorous and diverse. Yeah, ok. Easier said than done. There are 100s of other issues that impede learning for a child. Some of it is teacher issues, a lot of it is things that are beyond the control of the school, but are NEVER discussed. Because, that is where the hard work is in making education accessible and beneficial to all students. That also takes time. And time, apparently, isn't what we have in the eyes of reformers and/or John Q Public. Pretty much any educational issue in my district is mandated to the teachers--and they never ask for our input. They just say "make it work." Again, easier said than done. Paying lip service to something without putting in the necessary work to make it better, means absolutely nothing to me--and to a lot of other people, too.

[Edwin Duncan]

06:05 PM on 04/26/2011

How can there be so many comments about educationese here with no mention yet of acronyms? As a member of a committee that met regularly with the College of Education administrators at my university, I was constantly bombarded with acronyms such as TEEB, NCLB, TAAS, etc., and to the great annoyance of the committee's chair, I stopped him every time he used one (about every other sentence) and asked him what the letters stood for. He hated it, but he was impossible to understand otherwise. I can live with adjectives like "rigorous" and terms like "scaffolding" since at least I know what they mean, but obfuscation through acronyms drives me up the wall.

[sidnee]

10:04 PM on 04/26/2011

Oh yes, acronyms annoy me even more than the jargon!!!!!!

[voxo]

04:42 PM on 04/26/2011

As a long time professor of anthropology and law, I would much prefer being known as a teacher than as an educator.

[joefoss]

03:22 PM on 04/26/2011

RE: Words That Only Education Bureaucrats Use
Most of the "oldies but goodies" Ed argot I encountered in graduate school have disappeared from use; but, on the rare occasions when I hear them, they still make me cringe:
="armamentarium"
Originally meant to describe the collection of techniques and practices in the medical field, this vowel-rich, military-sounding word was appropriated by education bureaucrats to describe their bag of tricks.
Why not just "storehouse" or "inventory"?
="rubric"
To be "subsumed under a rubric"--a fate worse than death!
Formally defined as "a set of criteria or standards used to measure learning objectives," I for some reason always associated the word with fashion. It sounds like a new polyester blend: "Is this shirt available in rubric?"
Why not just "criteria"?
="perseverate"
My all-time, cringe-inducing favorite. A psychological term coined to describe
repeated, sometimes uncontrollable, speech or behavior, this became a popular word for school psychologists and administrators to use when talking about kids who persist in various kinds of
misbehavior.
Why not just "pain in the ass"?

[sydneymoon]

10:58 PM on 04/27/2011

I nearly fell off my chair. Hilarious.

[ianhoke]

02:39 PM on 04/26/2011

I speak the language of education as an educator, and I fully agree that many of these terms are nonsense - perhaps none more than "21st century skills/learning." However, some of those terms pertain to actual practices - best practices, which as a term actually has meaning and linguistic awkwardness. Scaffolding, for example, if used sensibly in a sentence might suggest to me that this teacher knows something about different ways in which children are intelligent and something about how to help them do something purposeful with their intelligence. Jargon is what peppers senseless speech; function words help people function in specific contexts, as other comments have mentioned, like scientific research, law, and probably even journalism, I might imagine. The trick for determining who is serious in any field is observing more what they do than what they say, and paying attention to how they use such words, purposefully or for padding.

[SupportPublicEd]

03:07 PM on 04/26/2011

Great points. I think the issue with making a blanket dismissal of education related terms is that there are good ideas contained in some of them and there is a valuable function of this language. Let's also not ignore the role of media in creating a soundbite culture where nuanced concepts are turned into catch phrases and jargon.

[BuffNutts]

02:22 PM on 04/26/2011

Much of this "talk/speak" originates from for-profit educational consultants. It is then picked up by school administrators who, while trying to sound like they are truly saying something of importance, dump it off on teachers during routine brain dead sessions called staff meetings. And on and on it goes.

[sidnee]

10:05 PM on 04/26/2011

Agreed!!! Every consultant we've had at our school/district always throws out the words and the acronyms---but never really help us do anything meaningful to help our struggling students. Money wasted, if you ask me.

[victoriaj1908]

01:59 PM on 04/26/2011

Great article!

[voxo]

01:26 PM on 04/26/2011

"at the end of the day" I usually go to bed.

[davbrown]

02:15 PM on 04/26/2011

This truth of the matter is, who are you talking about when you say "educator"? I am a teacher and I consider myself a true educator. The "educators" out there that use all this jargon have little to no actual classroom experience. I find that "true educators" or teachers for the most part do not use such jargon. We speak from the heart and it comes through loud and clear. Many "educators" us jargon because it does make them seem more important when in fact they know very little about teaching. All they know about is numbers, but we know children.

[Montcalms Revenge]

01:20 PM on 04/26/2011

"No matter how thin you slice it, it's still baloney." --Gov. Alfred E. Smith (NY)

[Grandma Koolfinger]

01:05 PM on 04/26/2011

Jargon is usually a bunch of self serving, politically correct crap to make administrators feel like they're actually doing something besides being an enormous drain on the education system. Hire good teachers and let the majority of these administrative "educators" pick up cans from the side of the road.

[broui]

10:54 AM on 04/26/2011

I agree wholeheartedly with Mr. Merrow.

I got into teaching later in life. I reject the jargon. It took me a couple of years, but it turns out that I'm a pretty good teacher. But articulating WHY I'm effective to colleagues and administrators who speak in this "educationese" has been difficult and miserable.

"I have come to the conclusion that it exists because of a professional lack of esteem."

True statement in my experience. Ours is a profession that is getting beat up unfairly. Increasingly, our profession seems to be inventing this Orwellian language to sound like it is reforming but on the whole, it is much ado about nothing.

I work with a great number of individuals who are constantly trying to improve their game but the target from above keeps moving - a constant source of angst and consternation.

[Tony Zini]

12:30 AM on 04/26/2011

The exponential growth in watered down jargon is a direct result of so called educational reform. Many of the reformers believe education can be boiled down to a set of steps or a "system" much like assembling furniture from Ikea. Administrators are buying into it because these systems promise better test scores. We have lost our way and we are not allowing teachers to teach and facilitate, nor are we allowing students to explore and discover. These "systems" are too confining but they provide the short-term successes many want to see.

[passion4teaching]

07:07 PM on 04/27/2011

Great! I'm glad at least someone can see through his jargon.

[BonnieJGordon]

11:37 PM on 04/25/2011

I'm surprised you didn't mention some of the most high-frequency verbiage I see in the education press, words like "accountability," "high expectations," "effectiveness," "standards" and "high-stakes testing." Much of what you seem to be bewailing is actually pretty well-defined terminology and not "jargon" in the sense of masking meaning through misappropriation (or overly-elastic appropriation) of words. What is jargony about the term "research-based"? It's a perfectly adequate way of discussing methods that have been field-tested and analyzed according to scientific principles, as opposed to methodology based on what another teacher mentioned at the last staff meeting as having worked for her. "Inquiry-based learning" refers to a very specific educational model with a number of aspects I think you might find commendable (like valuing students' ideas and input).

But as a freelance journalist currently studying to become a licensed high school English teacher, I find usages like "accountability" often devilishly vague. "Policy-makers are calling for more accountability in public schools," for instance: To whom should who be held "accountable," and for what? Teachers to students? Teachers to parents? Administrators to parents? States to school districts, or vice versa? A phrase like that almost never means what it should, i.e.: Students should give a full accounting of their academic progress by demonstrating skills that they will use for the rest of their lives.

[carester]

09:01 AM on 04/26/2011

As a parent with children in the school system, I might help. First, you probably won't like it, but here it is. The word accountability in reality means "keeping teachers' feet to the fire." Yeap! Unfortunately, taxpayers want the most out of the money they invest (via taxes) in education, parents more and more want teachers to work miracles on their children (the lazy kids they do a horrible job raising), and tiger moms/dads want high-achiver teachers who challenge their children. So, pretty much everyone thinks about teachers when they say accountability.