Quite frankly, phasing out a word (and this is definitely NOT going to be the only one, if "fail" goes, other negative words are sure to follow) is going to negatively impact education. Maybe it's not the slippery slope towards phasing out all testing, maybe it is, it doesn't matter. If you can't hold students to some standard of performance (or have to handle them with kid gloves when they fail to meet it), education will become a farce. How are these kids going to react when they get out into the world of work and expect to be able to fail without consequences or at the very least, without being told they fail?

You're going to wind up with a generation of citizens who A.Don't understand the language or the concepts behind it properly and B.Are handicapped by 12 years of feel-good-ism.

Adrian