NYC DOE Declares War on Words

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The New York City Department of Education is waging a war on words of sorts, and is seeking to have words they deem upsetting removed from standardized tests.

I have a bad feeling about this...

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Fearing that certain words and topics can make students feel unpleasant, officials are requesting 50 or so words be removed from city-issued tests.

Because children must never be allowed to feel unpleasant or be the least bit upset. It'll scar them for life!

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The word “dinosaur” made the hit list because dinosaurs suggest evolution which creationists might not like, WCBS 880′s Marla Diamond reported. “Halloween” is targeted because it suggests paganism; a “birthday” might not be happy to all because it isn’t celebrated by Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Translation: Bawww! Not everyone shares my belief system, and this hurts my feelings! No one should hear about concepts I don't like!

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Words that suggest wealth are excluded because they could make kids jealous. “Poverty” is also on the forbidden list.

So...you're not allowed to mention wealth and you're not allowed to mention poverty. Did someone laugh at these bozos at Occupy Wall Street or something? They sure sound butthurt.

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In a throwback to “Footloose,” the word “dancing” is also taboo. However, there is good news for kids that like “ballet”: The city made an exception for this form of dance.

Ballet is the only real dance! All that other stuff is teh ebul, and if we don't put it on standardized tests, it'll go away!

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Also banned are references to “divorce” and “disease,” because kids taking the tests may have relatives who split from spouses or are ill.

'Cause we all know that if the school doesn't test kids on something, they won't learn about it or have their feelings hurt by it!

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“So we’re not an outlier in being politically correct. This is just making sure that test makers are sensitive in the development of their tests,” Walcott said Monday.

Dinosaurs and birthdays are insensitive!

Other forbidden terms include politics, slavery, and terrorism. All because someone, somewhere, somehow, for some reason, might, at some point, find something offensive, and that would be the end of the world. If you allow children's feelings to be hurt, we'll all be as dead as the dinosaurs!

Whoops. Did I just say something offensive?

Yet, somehow, America makes this law seem necessary

This is ridiculous. This is almost too silly for its own good.

And people wonder why kids are getting stupider. All we're doing is slowly devolving with every generation. If these kids wander around stupid and get hit by a semi because they didn't know better, at least they won't pass their stupid gene on.

At the same time, what kind of silly fuck sits with a dictionary open and says, "Hey! These words could cause brain-trauma to a kid! Can't let this happen! Secretary! Get me the Department of Education and tell 'em we have words to censor! Why are you laughing?"

There's no love lost between me and the DoE, but I'm having trouble getting worked up over this. First, this policy only applies to the citywide standardized tests, not to classroom instruction. I have no doubt whatsoever that as soon as this story broke, teachers all over the city started putting dinosaurs and dancing and other topics from the list into their homework assignments.

Second, the DoE (and its boss, Mayor Mike) prioritize those standardized test scores above almost all else. Those scores are what they use to determine if schools and even individual teachers are good or bad. [That is something worth getting upset about.] Knowing that obsession, this policy makes a kind of sense; they're trying to eliminate one of the (many, many) outside factors that can lower those all-important scores, emotional distraction. If kids, especially younger ones, get saddened or overexcited by something in a question, they may not do as well on the question. So if the DoE figures that cutting out distracting subject matter can bump up those scores by a percentage point or two, of course it's going to do it.

TheIan wrote:

This is ridiculous. This is almost too silly for its own good.

And people wonder why kids are getting stupider. All we're doing is slowly devolving with every generation.

Only the poor, working-class ones.

Can't have them thinking too much, after all. They might get ideas above their station.

I am inclined to agree with Drab. Our education system is screwed as all hell, but not because ~emotional coddling~ or ~peaching self-esteem~ or ~not using red pen for corrections~ or whatever the hell people are bitching about is making students 'soft' now.

I also agree with Drab. I don't see as this as being a major issue as long as they do not try the over-PC word censoring outside the standardized tests. Because THEN it would become a First Amendment issue...and I bet the DOE does not want to be under the microscope of the ACLU.

Besides...we ARE dealing with the English language here, which is already broken to begin with.

Reep, I didn't say that was a non-issue; it's just not what's happening here. This decision was about getting test scores up. They're tweaking the system to squeeze out a few extra points. [What, a government entity in New York manipulating their numbers? That's unprecedented! ]

Of course, if it works, I don't expect Mike and Dennis to give this the credit; they'll take that for themselves and their "leadership" of the DoE, and probably throw in an attack on the UFT (the teachers' union) for good measure.


EDIT: GMA, the DoE isn't all that worried about the ACLU or its microscopes.

Apparently Delores Umbridge is alive and well and living in New York. "If we don't talk about the bad things, they'll go away! La la la la laaaaaaaaa!"

EileenK98 wrote:

Apparently Delores Umbridge is alive and well and living in New York. "If we don't talk about the bad things, they'll go away! La la la la laaaaaaaaa!"

I think you mean Fudge, but... yeah.

Sakurelf wrote:

Yet, somehow, America makes this law seem necessary

That depends how many trees there are, clearly.

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Drabbler's Post

>Complaining about evaluating teachers based on how well they teach kids things

I bet you also whine about merit based pay and support the concept of tenure.

>mfw

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Mikey Go WOOGA wrote:

>Complaining about evaluating teachers based on how well they teach kids things

That would only be true if these tests were an ideal method of evaluating that, but this very move by the DoE is an admission that other factors can skew the results.

I did not say it was a non-issue either, just that our education systems has a great many more deeply rooted problems, of which worshiping at the alter of standardised testing is only one.

Maybe I am just bitter that my high school was punished because we failed to eek out high enough test scores from our special needs kids, some of which were literally incapable of holding a pencil and yet were still required to take the same tests.

Reepicheep-chan wrote:

I did not say it was a non-issue either, just that our education systems has a great many more deeply rooted problems, of which worshiping at the alter of standardised testing is only one.

Maybe I am just bitter that my high school was punished because we failed to eek out high enough test scores from our special needs kids, some of which were literally incapable of holding a pencil and yet were still required to take the same tests.

Same for the high school I went to. Right after they implemented the NCLB standards, our school was punished because, despite having the highest scores in the district again, we hadn't improved *enough* over the previous year's numbers. Apparently they expected the special needs students to just magically be able to manage these tests, and we had the full spectrum at our school (mild to severe needs). It took a few years of "What the hell do you people want from us?" on the part of our administration to get people to back off.

Standartized tests are supposed to be as bland as possible, in order to not put additional hurdles on people with different cultural background. Just think about how questions about yachting can impact the score of children of poor families, or something about leukemia to someone who has just lost a parent to the disease.

The effort is mainly to remove words from unrelated questions... or at least I hope so.

TheIan wrote:

And people wonder why kids are getting stupider. All we're doing is slowly devolving with every generation. If these kids wander around stupid and get hit by a semi because they didn't know better, at least they won't pass their stupid gene on.

Yeah man it really sucks. Who do these assholes think they are? I also hope the kids who are affected are fucking murdered.

The fuck is wrong with you?

Just Chipper wrote:

TheIan wrote:

And people wonder why kids are getting stupider. All we're doing is slowly devolving with every generation. If these kids wander around stupid and get hit by a semi because they didn't know better, at least they won't pass their stupid gene on.

Yeah man it really sucks. Who do these assholes think they are? I also hope the kids who are affected are fucking murdered.

The fuck is wrong with you?

dude I didn't even notice that because every time TheIan posts I just see a testcard

seriously in my head it goes "dooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo"

EDIT: Pointless ramble, now that I think of it.

Cyberwulf wrote:

Just Chipper wrote:

TheIan wrote:

And people wonder why kids are getting stupider. All we're doing is slowly devolving with every generation. If these kids wander around stupid and get hit by a semi because they didn't know better, at least they won't pass their stupid gene on.

Yeah man it really sucks. Who do these assholes think they are? I also hope the kids who are affected are fucking murdered.

The fuck is wrong with you?

dude I didn't even notice that because every time TheIan posts I just see a testcard

seriously in my head it goes "dooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo"

On top of that, I seriously doubt that the current generation of K-12 kids can really be considered stupider than previous ones. A serious lack of critical thinking skills are still present, but I know for a fact that I didn't get a whole lot of support from my schools to think about ideas and philosophies any further than their surface value. The sheer volume of information that is thrown around on a daily basis today is exponentially higher than what was present in the 90's, or hell even the early 00's. You can argue about the value of the information that "kids these days" possess, but you cannot deny that they have to deal with much more information. That much stress applied to the brain is sure to increase the capacity for information, regardless of if you think it's important or not.

Sorry about the structure of all that I wanted to make sure I didn't edit it into oblivion then just delete the entire damn thing. Again.

Re: Bitching about standardized tests.

There have to be standardized tests on critical (as in vital) knowledge that's easy to standardize. This boils down to "Critical (as in critiquing) Reading" (i.e. Grammar, knowing the meanings of words, and such) and math.

These two skills are too important and too basic to not bludgeon them into kids' heads, if need be.

After that, the only particularly important subjects are history and maybe a science of some sort, and those seem harder to standardize.

Past that, it's all elective BS there to kill time.

God, do they think keeping these words out of children's vocabularies will make the actual THING stop existing? Or that the kid will never need to know about them?

Stupidest thing ever.

I'll tell you what will make these things go away - removing them from the dictionary!

Shut the fuck up, Rivelz Harley.

Mikey Go WOOGA wrote:

Past that, it's all elective BS there to kill time.

IDK, what about foreign languages? I remember the Spanish and (if you elected into it) Portuguese tests being a big deal at my schools, but I also lived in an area with a lot of people who speak those languages, so that might just be me.

... I've noticed, whenever harley posts, she/he/it is never on topic about what's actually being talked about.