To the short list of loaded words she cites, I would suggest adding this: “for-profit.” Whenever private sector providers of educational services, software or other products are referenced in news articles or blogs, they are invariably referred to as “for-profit education companies.” The instant implication is that these organizations are concerned about nothing but their bottom lines.

In fact, private sector education companies are typically hired by state education agencies and school districts. If they do not perform, they can be fired, or the terms of their contracts changed – as is the case with any business providing a product or service to a public entity.

Why is it then that only in education is an organization’s tax status an acceptable label – and a pejorative one at that? Journalists do not typically rail against “for-profit” airlines, or “for-profit” healthcare providers, or “for-profit” defense contractors.

Private providers of education services and products deserve much more respect than they typically receive from journalists and editors. Indeed, businesses foster innovation and bring capital, research and accountability to help every school and all students do their very best. And while the education industry and members of my association are not perfect, we are committed to quality and continuous improvement — just as what we all should expect from our schools, teachers and students.

Dropping the “for-profit” epithet would be a good place to start. Instead, may I suggest using “commercial,” “private-sector,” or simply “education business?”

Thanks again for a great column.

Steven Pines
Executive Director
Education Industry Association

I begin to wonder whether journalists, even perfect ones, can resist the myriad obfuscaters.

When you can’t use the term inner city or guinea pig, then you can’t communicate accurately about what is happening. When poor kids are being experiemented on, don’t you think that they know they are being treated like lab rats? Its the reality that’s brutal and self-censorship doesn’t help.

When talking with inner city kids (or should I say kids that live in intense concentrations of generational poverty and trauma) the pattern tends to be the opposite as with talking with their parents. Its the adults who demand restraint that often crosses over into political correctness. The kids want honesty.

And its the excess of political correctness, and the perceived soft-heartedness of progressives, that helped give rise to the contemporary “reform” movement. They adopted “brass knuckle” reforms in order to promote a toughness that they saw as necessary. I think they were misguided, but clearly they were reacting (overreacting?) to the Great Society and contemporary liberalism.

You are right that journalists have been wrong in just using the words “reform.” They could have said the “contemporary reform movement,” and the contrasted it with reforms in the progressivism tradition, or “data-driven reform,” or the “contemporary accountability movement.”

That being said, I taught high school. Regarding elementary kids, you are right and I’m wrong.