At times it seems as if everyone involved in education lives on doublespeak, which starts at the top and flows downward. The Omnibus Education Act, passed by the Florida State Legislature in 1984, changed some terminology in the Florida statutes dealing with remedial education. In place of “remedial and developmental instruction” there is now “college preparatory instruction,” while “remediation” has become “additional preparation” and “remedial courses” has become “college preparatory adult education” or “college preparatory instruction.” At its October 1986 meeting, the State Board of Education in Ohio adopted a series of recommendations presented by its literacy committee, including these: “As early as a student is identified as an underachiever, an individualized intervention program with multiple teaching approaches should be developed” and, “An ongoing marketing approach should be implemented to provide the outreach necessary to find the unserved adult illiterate population.”
The Troy, New York School Board passed the following resolution at one of its meetings in 1983: “Resolved, that the Superintendent be authorized to engage a consultant in public school administration for the purpose of assisting the Superintendent to plan a study to make specific recommendations in regard to the planning for management use and allocation of personnel and material resources particularly in the following areas. . . .” In 1984 the Amarillo, Texas Independent School District Board of Trustees hired two consultants to help in the search for a new school superintendent. The consultants wrote a public opinion survey that contained such sentences as these: “Each item in the instrument is productivity-oriented. Pupil Products expected are itemized first. Production Systems present in the district are itemized second.” The National Testing Service Research Corporation of Durham, North Carolina prepared a report in 1980 on the results of a program designed to attack functional illiteracy among adults. The quality of this report can be illustrated by this sample of the prose used in the report: “The conceptual framework for this evaluation posits a set of determinants of implementation which explains variations in the level of implementation of the Comprehensive Project. . . .”
The doublespeak flows also into the classroom, with textbooks, lectures, and course materials filled with it. The following is the description of a graduate course in anthropology at the City University of New York:
As macro-processual interpretations come increasingly to seem, to historians, to falsify the complex multidirectionalities of local-level phenomena, and as community-based ethnographies come increasingly, in anthropology, to be situated within these same macro-processes, the framework for a synthesis between anthropology and history that has been building over the past twenty years, and that has achieved some substantial success, is starting to come apart, and is doing so in ways that can not be remedied by a return to earlier, more particularistic concerns.
Potsdam College of the State University of New York offers a course called “Clinical Techniques in the Human Services,” which is described as focusing on “Theory and issues regarding clinical practice with major processes in human services including contingency management, supportive therapy, assertiveness training, systematic desensitization and cognitive restructuring.” The description for the “Nursing II” course at Rutgers University, Camden, New Jersey states that the course “focuses on the care of clients throughout the life cycle who have basic alternations in health status. Stresses a multidimentional approach and encompasses . . . the amelioration of the health status of the client. The restoration of health a major focus.”
At least the people in the St. Vrain Valley School District could translate their doublespeak. Most users of education doublespeak don’t have the faintest idea what they’re talking about when they use doublespeak. They sure sound impressive, though, enough so that you would never dare question what it is they’re saying lest you appear ignorant and uninformed. Many of those who use doublespeak hope for this reaction. When one school board voted to deny funds for a new swimming pool, the high school principal simply submitted a proposal for an “Aquatic therapy department” for handicapped children and promptly got his new swimming pool.
Remember the old days when there were physical education classes? Well, physical education is out of date; it’s now called “human kinetics” or “applied life studies.” Sports are called “movement exercises.” In 1988, officials of the University of Minnesota School of Physical Education wanted to rename their school the School of Human Movement and Leisure Studies. Michael Wade, the school’s director, defended the proposed name change by explaining that other universities call their phys ed schools by such impressive names as “School of Kinesiology” or “School of Sport Exercise Science.” (After all, Colorado State University changed the name of its phys ed department to the “Exercise and Sports Science Department” in 1986.) Wade noted that the old name put his faculty at a disadvantage when seeking grants, since the name of his school was not as impressive as the names used by those other schools. Wade also noted that there are two “journals of human movement” read and respected by professionals in the field. At last report the board of regents wasn’t too keen on the idea, but Wade planned to continue his efforts.
Colleges no longer raid each other’s faculties for big-name scholars. “Raiding isn’t the right phrasing; it’s selective development,” said George Johnson, president of George Mason University. In Indiana they have a program called “quality recovery,” while in Minnesota it’s called “preventive retention.” Colleges don’t talk of looking for students to boost their enrollment. Instead, they talk about “posturing ourselves aggressively and positively to enhance our position in the enrollment marketplace” and “aggressively enhancing retention through positive recruitment and advisement programs.”
Parents are told “there will be a modified English course offered for those children who achieve a deficiency in English.” Children who talk to themselves “engage in audible verbal self-reinforcement,” while children who disrupt class have an “attention deficit disorder.” And children who have poor “graphomotor representation” just have lousy handwriting. Kids don’t even cheat on tests anymore. According to a 1985 report by the Chicago Board of Education, an audit of scores on a reading test showed that “something irregular happened that can’t be explained by chance.”
Teachers are “educators” these days, or “classroom managers,” or “learning facilitators” who possess effective “instructional delivery skills” which they demonstrate in “microteaching sessions.” Teaching is called the “learning process” and learning is called “adjusted behavior.” Students don’t study, they spend “time on task” in their “learning environment.” Students who skip school don’t have to worry about the truant officer. If they live in New York they worry about the “attendance teacher.” My eight-year-old stepdaughter has already become so imbued with education doublespeak that she insisted she did not take swimming lessons. It’s “instructional swim,” she informed me and her mother.
Teachers rarely test students these days. Instead they “implement an evaluation program,” “conduct a needs assessment,” (or, better yet, “implement a needs assessment strategy”), or prepare an “analysis of readiness skills” using an “evaluation tool (or instrument).” At Taft Junior High School in San Diego, California, students don’t pass a grade, they “articulate.” When students select the subjects they want to take in the next grade, it’s called “articulation.” Students ride to school on a “transportation component” which is operated by a “certified adolescent transportation specialist.” When teachers go on a camping trip, it becomes an “outdoor education interdepartmental articulation conference.” Even the coaches get in on the doublespeak when they call a stopwatch an “ascending timing device” or a “descending timing device.”
The best schools are up on all the latest theories in education. First, you should remember that the very best schools aren’t schools at all but “primary or secondary educational institutions” where “empirical–rational,” “normative–re-educative,” or “power–coercive”
