New Report Cards: Read the Fine Print

When Simi Valley parent Coleen Ary saw the new report card two of her children would receive last fall, she was mortified.

Gone were the familiar squares that first- and second-grade teachers filled in with A’s, Bs, Cs, Ds or Fs. Gone entirely, in fact, were letter grades, those universal symbols of achievement that made students burst with pride or wallow in shame.

Now, 160 academic and social skills--from “holds book upright” to “writes numbers 100-1000”-- were listed on the lower-elementary progress reports in the Simi Valley Unified School District. What had been a simple chart with a letter grade and a few lines of teacher comments in reading, writing and arithmetic was a maze of fine print, chock-full of descriptions of what Johnny should be learning in school.

Ary, a former script supervisor and mother of four, felt she needed a decoder.

“I sat down and said, ‘What does this mean? Is my child exceptional or does he need work in this area?’ It’s gobbledygook.”

Welcome to the brave new world of report card reform.

Whether in response to public pressure for more accountability or new ideas about how to measure what students ought to know, educators in thousands of elementary and middle schools from California to Florida are taking a hard look at the way they report on students’ learning progress to parents.

Increasingly, they have decided that the familiar A-through-F report card just doesn’t make the grade.

Kinder and gentler terms--from “emergent” and “beginning” for low-level achievement to “developing” and “early fluency” for higher-level learning--are taking hold. On some cards, the best grade for turning in homework on time and respecting authority has become “. . . usually.” To be avoided are “rarely” and “sometimes.”

But tampering with a sacred tradition is asking for trouble. Why deprive a child of the thrill of running home with a card emblazoned with A’s, traditionalists say? Or why let a subpar student get away with “NC,” as in “not currently demonstrating this behavior”?

Robbed of the ritual of rewarding their sons and daughters for a job well done, parents at one Simi Valley school wailed: “What do I pay my kids for now?”

As trivial as that may sound, it goes to the heart of the problem parents have with many of the new progress reports: They can be cumbersome, confusing, jargony, user-unfriendly. And they have none of the easy shorthand that letter grades provide.

“I got four Exceeding Goals” is no match for the back-slapping clarity of “I got straight A’s!”

Five years ago, the Los Angeles Unified School District adopted a report card so complex that it came with a 36-page manual for teachers and parents. It was redesigned to give more information and to better reflect new goals in elementary instruction. It replaced letter grades for first through third grades with S for “area of strength,” G for “shows growth,” and N for “needs improvement”--and increased the categories assessed in each subject.

Reaction from parents was mixed, while teachers seemed united in frustration. According to a survey last year by United Teachers-Los Angeles, teachers overwhelmingly said the report card was too technical and too time-consuming, and used fuzzy terms to describe progress.

Exhausted from filling out and trying to explain the new card, Walnut Park Elementary School got a waiver a few years ago allowing it to streamline the card and return to the familiar grades. Other schools have been permitted to develop cards that replaced letter grades with more descriptive terms that measured progress in learning stages.

“It was a communication thing: Less is more,” said Walnut Park teacher Diane Rios, who helped design her school’s simpler card. “The old report card was just too overwhelming for the parents. We felt just hitting the basics right on the nail was what they wanted.”

Some education experts also are a bit perplexed by the more-is-more trend. “It’s like the weather report,” said Michael Usdan of the Institute for Educational Leadership, a Washington think tank. “You hear them go on and on for 10 minutes about all these different things . . . weather fronts, cloud layers. And all you want to know is, what’s the temperature?”

Myron Dembo, a USC professor of educational psychology, agrees that alternative cards are beyond the comfort zone of most parents. But there is nothing scientific about letter grades, he cautions.

“What parents don’t realize is that a grade’s meaning varies greatly from teacher to teacher,” he said. “That’s not the primary reason I would do away with grades. It’s just that grades often don’t tell you everything.”

Educating ‘Whole Child’

Today schools want to tell parents so much more than just Johnny got an A in reading, writing or arithmetic. Does he read phrases, recognize certain words on sight? Can he write a story from beginning to end? Does he use math to solve real-world problems? Does he understand the concept of cultural diversity?

“The trend in education now is to educate the whole child,” said Theresa Winfrey Greenwood, a professor of primary education at Indiana’s Ball State University, who has developed a video report card--replete with music and graphics--for the elementary school on campus. “Because of that, we need to be able to report back to parents about how we educated the whole child.”

High schools are reluctant to tamper with the traditional grading system, fearful of how colleges would react. But in the lower levels, the revamping of report cards has been motivated by philosophical and practical reasons. Particularly in kindergarten and the primary grades, schools are encouraging children to learn at their own pace, leading many educators to question the usefulness of letter grades at such an early age.

One of the most popular types of new cards is the checklist, which breaks down each academic subject into subcategories of abilities considered essential by the school or district. Teachers may indicate mastery simply by circling the item or placing a check mark or other symbol by it.

Another variation takes a more complex view of achievement, not merely detailing the important skills but grouping them by difficulty level and showing which stage of learning a student has reached. These stages might be numbered or given descriptive labels, such as “emergent,” but generally are not graded.

This approach, said Rob Hunter, a principal who helped devise Simi Valley’s report card, helps children set their own learning goals in a way that traditional letter grades do not. It also thwarts the competition for grades that many educators believe hinders learning for learning’s sake.

Doing away with grade labels makes kids more willing to put forth effort, Hunter said. “Say you’re able to jump a 2-foot bar. We say great, let’s raise it to 2.4. That’s when kids make progress, when you say this is what you’re able to do, here’s your next learning goal. An A-through-F report card does not give that message.”

Three years ago, Hunter’s school replaced the traditional card with one that gave parents detailed statements about skills students were expected to master. It was a precursor of the format being piloted at other Simi Valley schools from kindergarten through second grade.

The new format “gives you the opportunity to tell how your child is doing compared to a standard” based on state and national curriculum guidelines, said Becky Wetzel, the district’s director of programs and assessment. This approach, proponents contend, takes the mystery out of grading.

“What many people don’t realize,” Hunter said, “is that A-B-C-D-F is not a very objective grade. . . . You can take a B paper, give it to two different teachers right next door to each other and they will give two different grades.

“But this report card gives very clear, specific statements. A child can either write a concise paragraph, or he can’t. I’d say this report card is a whole lot more truth-in-education than A-through-F is.”

Many teachers praise it, saying it sharpens their efforts and forces them to observe their students keenly.

“You have to know your children better,” said Laurie Pohlmeier, who teaches first- and second-graders at Park View School. “You have to know more detailed information about them. You have to know specifics.”

Parents who favor the new card say it offers a more complete picture of their child’s strengths and weaknesses and fosters more positive attitudes toward school.

“When I was going to school, you had your A student and you had your C student,” said parent Angie Chippendale. “This [new card] doesn’t put a kid into a category like that.”

But other parents say, what’s wrong with that?

“The whole concept of eliminating competition is nonsense,” said Ary, whose children attend Hollow Hills Fundamental School, where teachers emphasize basics. “If they earned a C, they should get a C.”

Ary and others fear that the drift from letter grading signals deeper problems in public education--such as a watering down of standards and an obsession with bolstering children’s self-esteem, even if they are failing.

Such criticism is echoed by parents in other communities where report cards have been overhauled.

About four years ago, school officials in Hernando County, Fla., tried to switch to a checklist card. They won the battle at the lower elementary levels but not at the upper ones.

“Parents were worried that we cared too much about making kids feel good,” said Dot Dodge, Hernando County’s supervisor of elementary education.

In neighboring Pasco County, a bedroom community north of Tampa, parents upset about a similar change gathered more than 4,000 signatures on a petition against dropping letter grades. The district yielded, agreeing to reinstate a more traditional card for third through fifth grades.

But some parents still aren’t satisfied. The grade of A, for instance, has been redefined. Instead of excellent, it means “exceeding expectations,” which critics say is just too mushy.

Grant Wiggins, director of the Center on Learning, Assessment and School Structure at Princeton University, is an advocate of nontraditional cards. He regards much of the criticism as “cranky resistance to better language.”

But the expert on report-card reform acknowledges that some re-engineered cards make him cringe. “I would say, sure, there are some cases [of report cards] becoming vaguer, wishy-washier and more euphemistic . . . that out of a misguided sense of protectiveness say ‘as long as you’re making progress, everything is fine.’ ”

What the best of the new report cards do, Wiggins said, is measure children against credible standards, rather than just against each other, which is where traditional grading curves sin. The cards, he said, should also be designed to report change in academic performance over a school career by using a common scale from grade to grade.

Wiggins said he has found such virtues in the card launched a year ago in the Rialto Unified School District in San Bernardino County.

Stages of Progress

Rialto’s system is heavily influenced by developmentalism, the belief that learning, to quote from the card itself, “is affected by the age and maturity level of the child, [and] his or her out-of-school experiences.”

Each academic subject is divided into eight developmental stages. Some key skills or learning attributes in each phase are listed.

A stage 1 reader is a child who shows interest in books and looks at the pictures only with adult support, while at stage 8 one can read independently “for a variety of purposes” and demonstrate “in-depth insights” about difficult material.

The card, used for kindergarten through sixth grades, measures progress by movement through the stages. Each stage overlaps several grade levels.

Through the third grade, teachers check off the column of the stage they see each student in. Fourth- through sixth-graders get letter grades to indicate work quality within a stage: A for “outstanding,” B for “above average,” C for “average,” and M for “more growth needed.”

“The old system didn’t give parents anything to hang their hat on,” said Lori Foster, Rialto’s director of curriculum. “If a child received a B, what did that mean? What could a parent do next to move the child further? What could you celebrate in what the child has done?

“We changed the report card to provide more information to parents, to offer an opportunity for teachers and parents to work together.”

Parent Richard Gow loves the new card. He said it has changed the nature of the dialogue he has with his fifth-grader, Caramarie. “When she comes home,” he said, “it’s not ‘What did you get on this or that?,’ it’s ‘How are you doing?’ ”

Caramarie, who attends Fitzgerald Elementary School, said her new card makes it easier to understand what is expected. And it has made her more confident.

“If you’re doing well in some subjects and all of a sudden you get a bad grade, that makes you feel you’re not doing good in any subject,” she said. “The new report card goes to where you’re at in a subject. Like, you’re mastering it or attempting it or practicing it and really trying to get an A.”

What appeals to the Gows, however, distresses Pamela Bleach.

The mother of four likes some of Rialto’s innovations. The wealth of information the card offers has given her a clearer picture of what students are taught, she said.

But in her view, the new system has fuzzed up the meaning of excellence.

The developmental philosophy makes it possible for a student working below grade level to receive a high mark, she said. So a fifth-grader whose best efforts in math are equal to a good third-grade performance could get an A within his development stage.

Although district officials say this scenario is unlikely, next year they will add a section to show whether a student is meeting grade-level expectations.

Bleach is encouraged by the revision. Still, she contends, the developmental approach allows weaknesses to be “glossed over.”

“You can have all the developmental stages you want, but if you’re way below [other kids], that A means absolutely nothing,” she said.

“I don’t want my kids to be patted on the back like that.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

New Look for Report Cards

New ideas about grading have given elementary-school report cards a startlingly different look. They are packed with information and reflect a more complex approach to assessing what students know.

WHAT THE CARDS SAY

The new report cards are different in several ways:

* Many of them have banished traditional letter grades because educators believe the A-through-F grading system is too subjective, labels children and discourages learning for learning’s sake.

* Some districts prefer a checklist format that shows whether a student has shown specific skills within a subject--i.e., “uses inventive spelling,” or “can match sets to numbers.”

* “Rubric” formats ask parents to view learning as a process. They divide achievement in a subject into several stages and show what phase a student is in, such as “emergent” for low ability, or “developing” for average ability.

* Narrative reports may consist entirely or primarily of written comments from the teacher (“Ben is having an excellent sixth-grade year . . . “).

HOW TO INTERPRET THEM

Today’s report cards may require a new view of learning:

* Many of the new cards are “criterion-referenced,” which means students are judged not against each other--the basis of traditional grading on a curve--but against a set of clear standards national curriculum guidelines.

* Report cards should tell not only the quality of a student’s work but how adequate it is when judged against grade-level expectations or other standards.

* The symbols used to express a student’s achievement level should be fully explained. Some cards use number scales, other employ descriptive terms and letters (S could mean “strong,” D “distinguished,” or E “exceeds expectations”).

* The emphasis is on learning and growth, rather than achievement on a fixed scale.