To soothe the bruised egos of educators and children in lackluster schools, Massachusetts officials are now pushing for kinder, gentler euphemisms for failure. Instead of calling these schools "underperforming," the Board of Education is considering labeling them as "Commonwealth priority," to avoid poisoning teacher and student morale. Schools in the direst straits, now known as "chronically underperforming," would get the more urgent but still vague label of "priority one."The board has spent parts of more than three meetings in recent months debating the linguistic merits and tone set by the terms after a handful of superintendents from across the state complained that the label underperforming unfairly casts blame on educators, hinders the recruitment of talented teachers, and erodes students' self-esteem.
While many educators support the largely symbolic changes, others call them sugarcoating and unnecessary, feeding into the sentiment that children are coddled. Debating the terms, they say, wastes time when the board should be coming up with a plan to fix the state's 114 low-performing schools. Changing the labels seems to be intended to appease overly sensitive educators, critics say.
"This is all word games," said John Silber, the famously brusque former Boston University president and former chairman of the Board of Education. "Changing the name doesn't change the reality. I think Shakespeare had a good line: 'A rose by another name would smell as sweet.' A skunk by any other name would stink."
When Silber presided over the board in the late 1990s, he chastised members for allowing students who scored at the "needs improvement" level to pass the MCAS test. He also recommended calling that level "deficient," but members balked.
"Now here they have schools that are not doing adequately, so they're changing the name?" he said with dismay. "Why don't we call them special schools?"
Zachary Tsetsos, a senior at Oxford High School and the only student on the board, said he finds the debate frivolous.
"Why are we spending time on this?," said the 17-year-old. "I don't want to tiptoe around the issue. I'm not concerned about what title we give these schools. Let's work on fixing them."
The labels were created following the state's 1993 Education Reform Act to highlight extraordinary failure rates in some schools. The 2001 federal law pushing for more accountability from school systems thrust the issues of failing schools and what to call them into the spotlight.
For years, Massachusetts superintendents have resented education officials for slapping them with the labels. Now, the board members are debating whether they should seek public comment on the new terms before amending state regulations to formalize the name changes in May.
Board members have already begun using the label "priority" for schools in the "underperforming" category at their meetings.