Posted on 03/22/2008 11:03:10 AM PDT by John Jorsett
To soothe the bruised egos of educators and children in lackluster schools, Massachusetts officials are now pushing for kinder, gentler euphemisms for failure.
Instead of calling these schools "underperforming," the Board of Education is considering labeling them as "Commonwealth priority," to avoid poisoning teacher and student morale.
Schools in the direst straits, now known as "chronically underperforming," would get the more urgent but still vague label of "priority one."
The board has spent parts of more than three meetings in recent months debating the linguistic merits and tone set by the terms after a handful of superintendents from across the state complained that the label underperforming unfairly casts blame on educators, hinders the recruitment of talented teachers, and erodes students' self-esteem.
While many educators support the largely symbolic changes, others call them sugarcoating and unnecessary, feeding into the sentiment that children are coddled. Debating the terms, they say, wastes time when the board should be coming up with a plan to fix the state's 114 low-performing schools. Changing the labels seems to be intended to appease overly sensitive educators, critics say.
"This is all word games," said John Silber, the famously brusque former Boston University president and former chairman of the Board of Education. "Changing the name doesn't change the reality. I think Shakespeare had a good line: 'A rose by another name would smell as sweet.' A skunk by any other name would stink."
When Silber presided over the board in the late 1990s, he chastised members for allowing students who scored at the "needs improvement" level to pass the MCAS test. He also recommended calling that level "deficient," but members balked.
(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...
Mr and Mra Smith, we’re making your son Bobby a Priority One student.
Suitable prose for the New World Order.
— Mark Twain
Silber ran for Massachusetts governor as a Democrat and lost. At the time I voted Republican indiscriminately. I consider voting for Bill Weld over John Silber as my greatest political mistake. I thought Silber was too cantankerous to work with the Massachusetts Legislature. Little did I suspect that Weld would appoint Margaret Marshall to the State Supreme Court and usher in homosexual marriage.
No matter how you cut it & or rename it FAILURE is still failure!
Oh heck. They could just look in a mirror.
Won’t work. “Commonwealth priority” will promptly acquire the meaning of “really poor school.”
Back in the day when I was in school, they renamed the classes for retarded kids “special education.” “Special ed kid” promptly became a synonym for “retard.”
For that matter, “retarded” was originally a euphemism for less polite words such as moron and imbecile.
Hahahahaha! Laboy flunked the state teacher literacy test THREE TIMES, yet still kept his job, and got raises. Plus he put 24 bilingual education teachers on unpaid leave for failing to pass an English fluency exam while he was flunking, too. And he's complaining about low staff morale?
It was a hard word. true in my case. i didn't realize it until college. I used to think ill of the good sisters until I got older. Some of my cousins in public school never went to college. They (even in the 70’s) always felt very good about them selves at school. (new math?)
I was pushed, yelled at and got detentions until I said enough and started to do the dang home work. Only a nun had the patients to could crack this hard head. Now there are no nuns (or very few) and I feel sad (Srockholm syndrome?)
Lord, I love that man! He's the only Democrat I've voted for in the last 30 years! He was running against William Weld, who was as much of a patrician as John Effin Kerry, and I had no qualms about voting for him for Governor. Unfortunately, he'd gotten snippy in an interview with a popular female Boston TV news anchor, and the media crucified him for it.
All those words used to have specific meanings, based on IQ. Then using IQ because un-PC, despite the utility of IQ in predicting many things.
See the chart about 2/3rds of the way down this page.
http://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/IQBasics.aspx
bump
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