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One reason to be glad that you are not a school administrator is that you don't have to deal directly with the Colorado Department of Education.
Last month, our school district received a report after
a visit from something called a Partnership Assistance
Review Team.
Among the team's recommendations was that The
district is encouraged to develop alternative student
success indicators that would provide the accountability
committees with a more comprehensive set of data points.
This information will be useful to the committees and
school community in developing additional strategies to
achieve the goals currently in place, particularly as it
relates to closing any discrepancies that may exist among
student sub-group populations in achievement.
What's an alternative student success indicator
?
Are they talking about alternative students, which
presumably means drop-outs who have re-entered the system
at an alternative high school jointly operated by Salida
and Buena Vista? Or some alternative way of indicating
student success -- in that case, why are the traditional
report cards inadequate?
English has been the Official Language of Colorado for
two years, but apparently that news has yet to reach the
Department of Education, which prefers a dialect known as
Educanto.
The term comes from Richard Mitchell, the
Underground Grammarian, who has noted certain
characteristics of Educanto.
Educanto speakers prefer the passive voice, as with
The district is encouraged . . .
rather than the
active, We encourage the district . . .
The passive
doesn't say who's doing the encouraging, and thus provides
an easy way to avoid responsibility. Recall during the 1988
presidential debates, when George Bush said Mistakes
were made
in the Iran-Contra affair. He could thereby
avoid saying who made the mistakes.
Educanto speakers also enjoy jamming nouns together, as
with student sub-group populations
and
alternative student success indicators.
In such constructions, you have to guess what is
modifying what, and so you don't know whether they're
really talking about alternative students
or
alternative indicators.
If the district guesses
wrong, it will be in trouble with the state at
accreditation time.
Even more disturbing were some of the understandable
parts of the report. The district is not in compliance with
current accreditation requirements, because Student
achievement results were not separated by race/ethnicity
and gender when used to develop the school improvement
plan.
Gender is a grammatical term, not a biological term. Words have genders. People come in sexes.
Even South Africa is getting rid of its racial identity
cards. But in Colorado, the Department of Education is
telling school districts to classify students by
race/ethnicity
and to keep score accordingly. What
happened to the quaint notion that our Constitution is
color blind?
Some of our legislators have been trying to mandate the teaching of the Federalist Papers and the Constitution in the public schools. That can wait until the state orders its own Department of Education to halt the process of racial classification, and to start using English.
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