The war on edu-speak
Parents in NYC can now read their children's report cards online - minus all the dense educrat jargon:
Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein has replaced a dense report card that measured student performance in more than 100 hard-to-decipher categories with a minimalist version, which the plain-speaking chancellor said was more his style.
The previous report card, 12 pages long, was created during the tenure of Chancellor Harold O. Levy and introduced systemwide this fall. The point was to assess students' grasp of each skill that new state learning standards require them to master. So in mathematics, for example, fourth graders were graded on 28 skills in six categories. But some of the descriptions were bewildering: "understands the commutative, associative and distributive properties," for example, and "represents the number of possible arrangements and combinations." Parents and teachers complained in October, and Mr. Klein promised he would scrap the lengthy report card as soon as Diana Lam, his deputy for teaching and learning, came up with a replacement.
The replacement is much shorter, simpler, and leaves out all the standard-setting jargon, so that parents can quickly find out if their child "uses correct grammar and spelling" or "computes with accuracy and efficiency." Certainly a huge improvement over trying to figure out what it means that your child isn't able to "interact with print daily for a variety of purposes," isn't it?