by Linda Conte in Schools and Youth
Posted on October 15, 2010 at 6:13 pm
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Have you seen the new report card? If you’re a parent of a child in grade 1 to 5 in Somerville Public Schools you won’t see it till the end of the first quarter, or at least until it gets posted on the Schools website (purportedly in the works). There will be no A’s on those cards, nor B’s nor Cs for that matter. The new “standards based” card is not even exactly a card. It’s at least a two page document (depending on how many comments your teacher adds), and it contains many various criteria (I count 73) for evaluating a child’s learning by whether the child “Meets the standard consistently”(M), “Sometimes meets the standard” (S), or is “Not meeting the standard” (N). This very different form of grading is currently in use in many area elementary systems, but it’s a pretty radical change for our system.
The buzz at my school (Brown) seems cautiously optimistic. Some kids naturally expressed concern that they’d miss the old grading system, but I had the good fortune of witnessing one teacher in the older grades introducing the new report card to her class. She explained that, “If you had a really bad day and got a bad grade on a test, it still means a lot, but I can look at all these other things to assess your learning….I’ll look at the test and break down the grade by which areas you’re strong in.” So, that was putting a pretty positive spin on it.
Then the conversation in class turned to some more specifics. There are two major sections of the new card, “Academic Performance” and “Student Responsibilities.” “How could you get an ‘N’ for ‘respecting school property?’ the teacher asked. Then, “What are some things you can do to show self control?” “What does ‘respecting peers’ mean?” asked a student. What a great teaching moment! She took full advantage and continued to spin the new card thusly: “It’s really good for you, and it’s really good for me….So you’ll know, ‘I’m really strong on this, but I need to work on that.’” Parents will work less hard because they will not need to sign and return the card. They will not need to worry about losing the paper either because it will be in their child’s private online account which parents can reference.
I wondered out loud if so many different standards would be difficult to gather data for each student each quarter. But teachers did not seem much afraid. I learned that some of the many categories will simply be marked “N/A” if, for example, the class did not cover poetry and drama that quarter, the standard of “Identifies and analyzes elements of poetry and drama” under the English Language/Arts section would not be applicable. Some of the standards are for skills that build on, so one teacher expressed concern that parents might find it hard to understand how a child might be meeting standards in “Demonstrates mastery of basic facts” in math one quarter and not the next. Another educator expressed the concern that parents may feel discontent over the lack of an “Exceeds expectations” report that used to appear on the old card. I’ll be interested to learn what concerns, or praises, parents do have when they get their child’s first report or view the card on the Somerville Public Schools website. Please add your comments!
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It does sound like the “student responsibilities” section can be useful in teaching. But 73 academic areas to evaluate each kid on! Even if many of them get “N/A,” that’s a lot of paperwork. I’m surprised teachers aren’t rolling their eyes.
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Consciously or not, the new report card reflects a number of major trends in k-16 education that might be considered a new context with an long history. That history goes back to the days before John Dewey, in fact before there were formal grades, where students studied in order to use whatever it was they studied, and were judged on that use rather than on raw data. In modern terms those are considered “soft skills” and – like responsibility, teamwork, listening, investigating, creativity, etc. – they are key to success in careers and college and…life. And those skills are not nearly as difficult to measure, understand, judge or “grade” as most people think: there’s nothing wrong with subjectivity in context, and most of the best “grades” reflect an opinion by a teacher which, more often than not, is shared by students and the class at large. Because measuring achievement on “soft skills” almost always requires an example – how else would anyone judge creativity – its often easier to create concensus on soft skill than on the validity of a test score.
The obsession – both pro and con – about MCAS shows how provocative “objective” exams can be, and creating metrics like those in the new report card give those scores context and meaning they might otherwise lack. More important than their accuracy, such measures help teachers and kids – and parents – identify problems that need solution, and strengths with which to solve those problems.
Just as a poor test score should not itself provoke punishment (you punish the REASON for that poor score, like, perhaps, avoiding work or ignoring teachers or fighting rather than looking at what you’ve got to do and doing it), these new metrics are more diagnostic than prescriptive. In other (and simpler) words, the question is what are you doing that’s good or great, and where do you need what kind of help. Such questions help teachers and students integrate assessment with instruction, and build on strength rather than ignore the good stuff to battle the bad.
Incidentally, it’s not a matter of paperwork. It’s all for the computer. And that is a change that goes a lot further than keystrokes. It allows teachers to see trends in individuals and groups of students, and administrators to find patterns among teachers and classes. Will there be higher scores in creativity in a music class than a phys ed class? higher measures of responsibility in writing or in math? in Ms. so-and-so’s or Ms. other-person’s? And can administrators help teachers help kids better when they have AND USE these data?
We’ll see. But before we had the data we couldn’t even see.
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