Edu-Speak

In the highly verbal world of public education, between the abbreviations (CAT tests) and the technical terms (_decoding skills_), parents must learn to translate them into English.

By Daniel Wolff

In the constantly shifting, highly verbal world of public education, parents are at a distinct disadvantage. As soon as your child enters kindergarten, you recognize that the people in the school buildings speak a different language. By your first teacher's conference, you may recognize that they're talking about your child, but, between the abbreviations (CAT tests) and the technical terms ("decoding skills"), you begin to doubt your ... well, your own decoding skills.

For the last decade, I've been involved in a grassroots community group in New York state, Nyack Partners in Education, or PIE, organized as an alternative to the local PTA. We've raised issues the traditional parent groups have avoided— from racial inequities in the school system to questionable hiring practices to ineffective reading instruction. Over the years, we've learned that the only way to discuss educational issues is first to translate them out of edu-speak into English (and, in our district, Haitian, Creole, and Spanish).

What follows is a brief overview of some common edu-speak phrases: what they mean and when you'll hear them. Universal as these may be, demographics do affect the specifics, so let me briefly say that ours is a well-funded suburban district with a diverse student population. Around 35 percent of our students are of color—African-American, Haitian-American, Hispanic, and Asian—and district parents range from multimillionaire investment bankers to single mothers in subsidized housing. But everyone has...