William Marvel: Faith-based Schooling

My wife often alludes to a hypothetical organization that she and a fellow graduate student imagined back in the 1990s. They would have called it SPUA, standing for the Society for the Prevention of Useless Acronyms. The irony was inspired by their coursework in a master’s program in education, where volleys of acronyms are deployed to mystify and exclude the uninitiated. Latin did the same service for medieval priests, and still does for modern lawyers. I'm reminded of SPUA at nearly every meeting of the Conway School Board.

The June 22 meeting was no exception. A complicated, 25-minute presentation on curriculum and student achievement, or growth, was intended as an encouraging update on student performance, but it left me confused, and perhaps more skeptical than ever. The color-coded charts that accompanied it were of no immediate help. As I tried, and failed, to follow the rapid-fire comparisons of statistics on proficiency and growth, while skipping back and forth between NHSAS and NWEA MAP assessments, I felt very much as though I had stumbled onto a used-car lot and been mistaken for a customer.