ABSTRACT
The author visited the Barclay School in Baltimore the same day that the new national "Standards for the English Language Arts" arrived the desk in New York. This produced what the authors of the new Standards might call "dissonant cognitive process diversity," or what an English-speaking person would call a jumbled mind. Barclay is a rigorous, structured, back-to-basics public school that combines confidence-building with high expectations. It gets results that elite private schools would be proud of, and it gets them from inner-city students, 85 percent of them black, 60 to 65 percent from single-parent homes. While Barclay insists on plain English, the new standards are written in mind-bending jargon. The standards, on the other hand, feature a picture of a third-grader's rather crude one-paragraph essay. It has twenty mistakes of grammar, spelling, and punctuation. In current educational theory, these aren't errors, just alternate expressions and personal spellings.
