Every time I hear "public charter" I will say "you mean semi-private school."

Time and again in the past 20 years experiment after experiment has used our students--particularly our students of color--as guinea pigs in attempts to close the "achievement gap." We do not have an achievement gap. We have a poverty gap and we have a funding gap. Of course poverty is not such an easy problem to solve, nor is the problem of adequate school funding, so we have to invent problems that have a simpler solution. The latest idea is that the problem is ineffective teachers protected by unions. So now the solution is to use test score pay... They used to call it merit pay.... Its new name is the value-added model... The corporate world sets the agenda and the corporate world decides our vocabulary list. Money is made from public schools. More money could be made if schools were completely privatized and unions were eviscerated...

I'm not a billionaire TV personality. I'm not a failed Chicago schools chief turned Education Tsar. I'm not a millionaire motion picture director. I'm not even an OUSD director. But I have been a classroom teacher for nearly a decade now and I'm getting very tired of buzzwords and schemes like public charter, merit pay, value-added, effective, and rigor (which I bet you didn't know actually means "great strictness or harshness"). My brother was in the Air Force for 6 years. We've had lots of conversations about euphemisms (“blue-on-blue mishap,” “insurgent,” etc.). I find it particularly offensive that some people who purport to have the best interests of our children at heart use words in the same deceitful way as people who are in the business of killing...

If they want to use words in the same way as those who wage war, then I declare a war of words on them. Every time I hear "public charter" I will say "you mean semi-private school." Every time I hear "achievement gap" I will say "you mean poverty gap, or funding gap." Every time I hear "merit pay" I will say "you mean test score pay." Every time I hear "value-added model" I will say "you mean business model." Every time I hear "rigor" and every time I hear "effective" I will ask "What do you mean?" and when they give me their answer, then I will say, "I think you need to pick a more accurate word."

I urge all of you to do the same.

http://perimeterprimate.blogspot.com/2010/11/we-should-be-careful-with-our-words.html

dying adjective using similar messaging techniques; just by repeating "dirty liberal" & "democrat party" over & over again.

surely something similar could be done with "semi-private school" & the rest.

Nt

They started this war and if they want to fight dirty (and they do) I'm totally willing to get down there too.

people are led by misleading labels, isn't it?

efforts to break into the tax payer bank vault ...

too stupid to tell the difference?

Best thing I've read today!!

K&R.

..and everything else.