USING EDUCATORESE:

A good teacher NEVER partakes of the temptation to use "educatorese" in the classroom or with parents.  To do so is to make one's self a party to the duplicity of public education.

What is Educatorese?  The following is an article written by Mike Royko who was a columnist for the Chicago Daily News, and whose columns were run by the Houston Post.

I cut this one out in 1974.  I had just started having kids in school that year!

Going All the Way With Educatorese

By Mike Royko

After thinking about the column I did last week on Chicago School Supt. James Redmond and his talent for speaking and writing in educatorese, I've almost decided to apply for his $56,000 a year job.

My qualifications are that I can be even more incomprehensible than he is.  Incomprehensibility is, of course, the most important skill a big-time educator can have.

That is why they use educatorese--their private language, which even they don't understand.  By being incomprehensible, nobody understands what they are trying to accomplish.  Thus, they cannot be blamed for failing to accomplish whatever it is they are trying to accomplish.

But they can always claim that they have succeeded.  Who can tell?

I concede it is bold of me to claim superior incomprehensibility, especially in the wake of Supt. Redmond's superbly incomprehensible list of long-range goals that he recently presented to the Chicago school board.

As I noted, Redmond vowed to do such things as:  "Promote the concept that the school facility is a functional extension of the instructional program."

And he asserted that "all key responsibilities and performance objectives are explicitly methods and techniques of adopted policy implementation."

That is high-quality  incomprehensibility, and it was easy to understand why Redmond has long been a prominent educator.  The school board was so impressed by his ability to confuse them that they are said to be ready to rehire him.

But I believe that I can outdo even Redmond.  I have been making a study of educatorese and have prepared my own long-range list of goals in educatorese.

All I ask is that the school board judge us fairly.

True, they seldom understand what Redmond is telling them.

But they will never understand me.  So why not seek perfection?

Here, then, is my long-range program:

*Interdisciplinary and supportive input will be used to synthesize a high potential for assessing failure.

*Optimal accountability will be used to facilitate post-secondary education enrichment.

*Adaptable and reciprocal nuclei will terminate in total modular exchange.

*A comprehensive study of prime interaction will be used to articulate the changing needs of society.

*An innovative and workable chain of command will focus our perspective on the energizing of an identifiable decision-making process.

*Through interpersonal, as well as intrapersonal, multicultural encounters, we will create a multipurpose framework of serial communication.

*Use of adaptable and workable methodologies will lead to the encapsulation of vertical team structure.

*An evaluative study will be made of the generative means needed to create those priorities aimed at the broadening of individual horizons.

*The perceptualization of counterproductive resources will be used to minimize as well as maximize the effect of motivational classroom context.

*An unequivocal commitment to the supportive curricula will help us articulate the need for further in-depth discussions.

*The cultural and behavioral diversity will encapsulate in a serial transmission of applicable cable tools and instrumentation.

*By use of flexible but reciprocal input, we will achieve an interaction that will individualize the control group and experimental group, as well as bring into play a prime attitudinal overview and implement a more healthy student-faculty relationship and needed resource systems analysis.

There is my program.  It is not a panacea, but it will work as well as Redmond's.

I can only hope that the school board, will view it with open minds, as well as open mouths.

Copyright 1974  Chicago Daily News

I love this column.  I've looked for it ever since I started this web site, and I just ran across it.  Does it sound like anyone you know? Mike Royko certainly left more of an imprint on our society and culture than James Redmond!

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A Footnote: