'Edspeak' Is in a Class by Itself

The next time you visit your child's teachers, you might ask them to clarify a few things.

For starters, is little Junior LEP or FEP? Does his school provide a FIP and a FAPE? Or does it offer a SLAPAT, because you may want one of those.

Then there's the question of whether he is socially promoting under a rubric for assessing English language development. If he isn't, you might want to check for phonemic sequencing errors or phonological process delays.

This is Edspeak--a language so bewildering that even teachers need glossaries to figure out what's being said. In the insular world of education, words morph and multiply almost daily as schools dream up new programs and chase new reforms.

Parents and teachers can expect a blizzard of buzzwords this week, in fact, as the state releases Stanford 9 test scores for California's nearly 8,000 public schools. Adults face a test of their own, figuring out quartiles and quintiles, content clusters and normal curve equivalents.

"It's unmatched twaddle. Unbelievable bilge. Absolutely staggering nonsense," says Martin Kozloff, a sociologist from the University of North Carolina-Wilmington, who has studied the lingo in teacher training programs.

Some districts, trying to be helpful, publish glossaries. Los Angeles Unified has one featuring 132 pages of acronyms and terminology--with about 4,000 entries--that could tie the tongue of even the most skilled linguist.

Ever hear of misarticulation or normed modality processing?

Unfortunately, the L.A. Unified glossary doesn't define the terms--only translates them into Spanish. And so, the term "morphosyntactic skills" becomes "conocimientos morfosintacticos."

Parents, thus, are left befuddled--in two languages.

"Alphabet soup," says Bill Ring, a father of two Los Angeles students. "I challenge somebody to figure it out."

Educators, of course, haven't cornered the market on fuzzy language. Doctors and lawyers, soldiers and politicians--they all speak in code.

But clarity is doubly important in schools, where teachers and parents are supposed to work as a team--and, after all, teach children to communicate. The first step, it seems, would be for the adults to speak the same language.

Critics say jargon undermines this partnership. It allows teachers and administrators to insulate themselves from scrutiny and maintain a grip on power.