Speaking Clearly and Edu-speaking: In Reply to Liz Willen

Liz Willen, editor of the Hechinger Report, doesn't like educational jargon. Neither do I, nor most people I know. My colleagues and I are some of the first to laugh and roll our eyes at the newest acronyms that get added to the alphabet soup we have to remember as educators. So it may seem that Willen's righteous rant against "the school establishment's 'edu-speak'" (as reprinted in the Washington Post) would resonate with me, but in fact it doesn't. Willen has painted education with too broad a brush, in the process diminishing the expertise and professionalism of educators.

Every profession has their jargon, their acronyms, their vacuous buzzwords. In the worst cases, these are linguistic signifiers, separating the "in-group" from the "out-group". I have no doubt that there are education professionals who use the language of education in that way. However...

I was taking notes during one of those tedious but important school board meetings rookie reporters are assigned to cover when I realized I had no idea what was going on. Board members and various school officials spouted an inaccessible language of acronyms. The board members spent hours talking to and over one another, using terms that must have baffled audience members. I later learned they were discussing raising property taxes to boost the school budget, a critical issue local voters and parents needed to understand.

The inability of a rookie reporter to understand the professional language of any group as they are working should not be taken as a problem with the working group. Is there any doubt that if Willen had been covering a meeting of financial executives, or NASA scientists, or NFL coaches, that there would have been jargon, abbreviations, and shorthand that she was not familiar with? Part of the responsibility of reporters is to translate from specific professional language into readable explanations for the general public, whether covering education or any other field.

Willen asks "Why do we need terms like 'value-added' or 'formative assessments?' Ugh." Well, because a formative assessment is an educational strategy that (1) research has shown is one of the most effective strategies to increase student achievement, and that (2) many teachers don't know how to use well. It's a thing in education. Asking educators not to use the term "formative assessment" is like asking a scientist not to use the term "electromagnetic field." Just because it's a semi-complicated phrase doesn't make it jargon. Derek Zoolander should not be our model for educational language.

"And what of charter-school movement lingo, replete with 'restorative practices' and 'growth mindsets?'" I wasn't aware that these were specifically charter-school terms. Our district has been working with teachers and administrators on restorative practices for several years now. And using the term "growth mindset" is shorthand within the education community for a complex and multi-faceted debate around student self-motivation and how teachers can best model for and encourage struggling learners. To dismiss the term "growth mindset" as simple edu-speak ("Har, har, kids grow!") is to miss the point entirely.

Willen seems to want educators to speak clearly. Nobody I know wants otherwise. But for professionals speaking to each other, using the terminology of the field is how they speak clearly. Asking them to speak to each other the same way they would to someone outside education is to denigrate the professionalism of the field. Willen writes:

Just try to decipher this recent press release about a new study proving“rubric-based assessment can be taken to scale and can produce valid findings with credible and actionable information about student learning that can be used to improve curricular and assignment designs and to increase effectiveness of programs and classes in advancing the most important learning outcomes of college.”

Actually, to educators conversant with their profession, that's pretty clear.

I spent several days at a conference recently with a group of fascinating educators, advocates and policy-makers, all deeply knowledgeable and committed to improving education. In one-on-one chats over a beer or breakfast, they spoke clearly about problems and solutions. And they kept the tone entirely conversational when discussing our children’s classrooms and college choices.
But everything fell apart the minute we broke up into “enabling environments” to revise “cluster logic models” and “establish comprehensive assessment systems.”

Lesson: Professionals don't speak to each other the way they do to non-professionals. This is not an indictment of educational jargon. To assume that everything in education is simple and can be explained in words of one syllable or less is to fall into the "I went to school, how hard can teaching be?" trap.

More than ever, the public needs easily comprehensible information about what is going on in schools, what is working and what is not. So what’s an education journalist to do?

 Learn the terminology and explain it clearly to your readers. In other words, your job.