Remember the uproar when people found out about a list of words and phrases that the Department of Education no longer found acceptable for city-issued tests? The DOE would like you to forget about all that. The Department quietly announced yesterday that the taboo test topics—which included words like "cancer," "divorce," "politics" and "war"—have been scrapped.
"After reconsidering our message to test publishers and the reaction from parents, we will revise our guidance and eliminate the list of words to avoid on tests," Department of Education Chief Academic Officer Shael Polakow-Suransky said yesterday. Still, the DOE is asking test vendors to be sensitive to the wide variety of backgrounds NYC students hail from. Specifically they are asked to avoid "unnecessary distractions." So we'd venture to guess that "parapsychology" and "sex" will remain verboten.
Meanwhile, while we're on the topic, we'd like to give a shout out to commenter SFNY for successfully using all of the DOE's bad words and phrases in one comment!
