New York city schools want to ban 'loaded words' from tests
New York (CNN) – Divorce. Dinosaurs, Birthdays. Religion. Halloween. Christmas. Television. These are a few of the 50-plus words and references the New York City Department of Education is hoping to ban from the city’s standardized tests.
The banned word list was made public – and attracted considerable criticism – when the city’s education department released this year’s "request for proposal" on March 8, 2010. The request for proposal is sent to test publishers around the country trying to get the job of revamping math and English tests for the City of New York.
The Department of Education's says that avoiding sensitive words on tests is nothing new, and that New York City is not the only locale to do so. California avoids the use of the word "weed" on tests and Florida avoids the phrases that use "Hurricane" or "Wildfires," according to a statement by the New York City Department of Education.
In its request for proposal, the NYC Department of Education explained it wanted to avoid certain words if the "the topic is controversial among the adult population and might not be acceptable in a state-mandated testing situation; the topic has been overused in standardized tests or textbooks and is thus overly familiar and/or boring to students; the topic appears biased against (or toward) some group of people."
http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2012/03/28/new-york-city-schools-ban-loaded-words-from-tests/
= new reply since forum marked as read
as it may offend 7th day adventists cause they don't celebrate b-days. Dinosaur because it may offend creationists. Halloween may offend fundies.
Absolutely un-effing believable. 
...it all makes sense now. 
weed 
Looks like somebody has too much time on their hands. They should save some money and fire anybody who "worked" on this.
Really, that's somebody's job. Nice to meet you Sam, what do you do for a living? Oh, I come up with lists of words to ban from kids 
Idiots
And we don't want that, right? 
