The art of redefinition.

• Author: Peters, Charles
• Position: Tilting at Windmills

In our continuing effort to educate our readers about the culture of bureaucracy, one lesson for which there has never been a shortage of fresh examples is the Art of Redefinition. Clever bureaucrats, when confronted with a potentially embarrassing statistic, know that they should never abandon hope. Instead, they redefine whatever they are quantifying so that the bad news is either mitigated or disappears. Take the administrators of Brooklyn's Franklin Lane High School. Anxious to avoid high dropout and failure rates that might reflect badly on their performance as educators, school officials have been pushing marginal students out the...