LITTLE ROCK — The last specimen of educanto adopted by Little Rock’s ever gullible school board was a $200,700 horse-choker of a study titled A Strategic Plan for the Little Rock School District, and the most impressive thing about it was the amount of money paid the consultants who put it together.
The thing was jammed full of the usual murky prose, academic jargon, and inflated promises. For example:
“The Strategic Plan for Little Rock Public Schools outlines an aggressive strategy to move our school district forward to embrace eyepopping goals for student achievement . . . .”
The only thing eye-popping about this plan was the cost. The actual text was filled with the kind of boilerplate guaranteed to make the eyes glaze over, such as:
“Fifth, Little Rock will have intensive, ongoing professional development programs for teachers. This will include several days for training each year, funds to hire trainers (whether central office professional development or external consultants) and site based instructional coaches totaling one FTE position for every 200 students. . . . The resulting school improvement process will provide career ladders for teachers and help the district create a pathway of instructional leaders:PLC coordinators, mentors, school wide instructional coaches, etc,”
Got all that?
To translate it into the fast vanishing tongue called plain English, the school district will require its teachers to suffer through even more mickey mouse courses instead of actually teaching kids. The district will also add more bureaucrats withmore pretentious job titles to its already sprawling table of organization. And greater emphasis will be placed on promoting educantists of every description up the “career ladder.’’ All of this was to be overseen by the usual capital-E Experts in Education. So it was only a matter of time before the school district hired still more consultants to act on the last consultants’ recommendations.
Sure enough, the other day Little Rock’s school district announced it will be spending another $234,600 of the taxpayers’ money to act on the first consultants’ study.
How long, you have to wonder, before a third team of high-priced consultants will be hired to follow up on the second team’s work?
This could go on for as long as the tax money lasts-as one high-priced study follows another, and one firm of consultants succeeds another. Meanwhile, education itself will just have to wait. As it has waited for so long.
No wonder a program like Teach for America, which recruits the most promising and idealistic graduates of liberal arts colleges, is turning out the best young teachers in the country, many of whom stay in the profession after they leave Teach for America. And proceed to raise the standards of American education, often through charter schools like the phenomenally successful KIPP chain.
For what it’s worth, one objective study-released by Mathematica Policy Research in2004-found that teachers fresh out of TFA “outperformed not only other novice teachers but also veteran and certified teachers in the same schools.”
The secret of TFA’s success? It starts with well-educated teachers. They begin with a solid grasp of the subject matter they’re going to teach-rather than just a lot of educanto.
Programs like Teach for America are where real reform in the schools begins: with the proper education of future teachers, not consultants’ reports. Such an education emphasizes content, not empty form. Meanwhile, so many of our departments of “education” just keep churning out educanto. And so many of our school districts keep falling for it.
Anote on the origins and practice of what has become the official language of America’s troubled educational system:
The term Educanto was coined by James D. Koerner in his classic work, The Miseducation of American Teachers, to designate the all-permeating fogspeak that has since come to dominate educational thought, or what passes for it.
Educanto has great power, since language shapes thought. Or in Educanto’s case, misshapes it. Just as Dr. Koerner warned, it “can reduce any mildly sensitive layman to a state of helpless fury in a matter of minutes,” for it “masks a lack of thought, and in fact can make thought of any important kind extraordinarily different.”
Educantists are prone to use their jargon liberally, sprinkling it over their prose the way lawyers do Latin phrases, and for much the same reason: to give it a spurious air of authority.
The vocabulary of Educanto, as obtuse as it is obscure, replaces thought with a series of tinkertoy phrases that add up to very little, but it can sound impressive to the usual gulls. It’s the academic version of the political language George Orwell devised in 1984, and named Newspeak.
After a proper indoctrination in Educanto, those fluent in it may proceed, in James Koerner’s phrase, “to undermine by imperceptible degrees, and finally to suppress entirely, the English tongue.”
Anyone who’s had to read this Strategic Plan for the Little Rock School District will know just what Dr. Koerner was talking about. It’s like having to trudge through verbal quicksand.
As with Newspeak, the purpose of Educanto is not just to provide a medium of expression for a particular worldview, but to make any other kind of thought impossible, the way static drowns out meaningful communication.
Paul Greenberg is the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Editorial, Pages 16 on 07/21/2010