Today is the last day of this school year’s first quarter. Teachers across the district are having professional development and deservedly catching their breath while the students stay home. A part of the teachers’ day will be spent completing report cards. For many of our parents, the report card is the most important communication of their children’s progress at school. Traditionally, much of what is considered for a grade is how well a student completed a set amount of work over the course of that quarter. Students who don’t do the work, even though they may demonstrate mastery of the skill or content, receive poor grades. The good news is that we are shifting away from this approach toward grading for our younger students. For this group, a grade is no longer based on a one chance event or completing a series of assignments, nor is a grade affected by the extra credit game that can belie the reporting of mastery. The bad news is that the transition to a standards-based report card-one that simply records the student’s learning status of the required standards- is challenging. It requires a teacher to spend more time on the recording of progress toward meeting the standards. It also requires a shift to not include the nonacademic criteria e.g., participation, neatness, extra credit, from our assessments. Instead, nonacademic (yet still important) skills like showing respect, demonstrating effort, and working cooperatively are reported in a separate part of the report card.In 2006 a KPBSD administrator compared our students’ grades with performance on state level tests. He found that there was no correlation. Students with Cs and Ds did just fine on the tests while some students with As and Bs had just average scores. Our strategic plan includes the implementation of standards-based report cards for all our students by 2018. Getting to this point will require a lot of work and for some teachers, a shift in how they assess student learning. Those events that prepare a student for an assessment of a standard, e.g., homework and quizzes, count as a way to provide critical feedback, but are not factored into the reporting of learning status on the measured standard. Not entering a homework score as a grade is a big shift for our teachers and students. This shift however, should help students take greater control over their learning when it is clear to them that the report card is based on mastery of a concept or standard and does not include how well the student practiced before this performance.
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