Frustrated Mom Feels Defeated by Opaque Pedagoguese

The jargon educators are told to use is insane, writes Dahlia Lithwick, who attended a recent open house at her kids' school:

The evening passed in a blur of acronyms, test names, and emendations to last year’s system. Which I also didn’t understand. In fact, I think it’s fair to say that I understood significantly less at this open house than I did at my sons’ open house during a sabbatical last year, when it took place overseas and in a foreign language.  

Let’s agree that I bear some responsibility for my failure to thrive in our kids’ schools.  

Education is a complicated enterprise and requires hard work on the part of parents and students alike. But somewhere along the line, public education became so completely overmastered by its own jargon, broad templates, and unspecified testable outcomes, that at times yesterday I felt as if I were toggling between a business school seminar and the space program; acronyms alone—seemingly random sequences of letters like MAP and SOL and EAPE—were being deployed more frequently than actual words. To be sure, the teachers seemed as maddened by it as the parents were. Even if we can all agree about the singular benefits of “project-based learning across the curriculum," I am less than perfectly certain any of us know what it means.

I feel the same way, only the jargon in my parts seems to consist of "rubrics" and "Final Summative Tasks" (FSTs).