With the first quarter of the school year gone and report cards set to go home today, D58 parents will get their first official look at the district’s new standards-based reporting.
There is plenty of background to be obtained on the district’s Web site, through school meetings and from information that has been coming home since standards-based reporting was piloted by the district last year.
There is also the scuttlebutt: parental concerns that the system is a confusing set of wishy-washy standards and teacher frustrations with the amount of time it takes to complete the cards and divine a letter grade for the various categories of performance.
The new system represents a “different philosophy of grading — one that places an emphasis on growth, understanding and mastery of skills over time,” according to an “In the Know” article by Dr. MaryBeth Webeler, assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction.
The new report card merges traditional letter grades (in grade three through six) with detailed assessments in each of seven core subject areas as well as non-academic areas — “effort,” “completes assignments,” “work habits” and “social skills” — which are reported separately.
By implementing various measurement techniques including observation, questioning and evaluating projects and performance, classroom teachers score students on a scale ranging from “consistently exceeding standards” to “meeting standards,” “approaching standards” and on down to “area of concern” and “incomplete.”
If the standards sound similar to those employed by the Illinois Standards Achievement Test, it’s because the new grading system is based on state learning standards.
The new report card is the culmination of 10 years of effort by the district to align its curriculum and assessments to those standards and is the product of four years of development by a committee of teachers, parents and administrators.
Following last year’s pilot program, which involved at least one grade level at every district elementary school, surveyed parents indicated that they had gained a “deeper understanding of their child’s academic progress,” according to the district.
Perhaps that’s due to the numerous areas of evaluation, including a sixth-grade social studies standard on understanding economic systems and a language arts standard on speaking effectively in a variety of situations.
Will the standards-based card improve parents’ understanding of their kids’ progress? Will it provide students with more specific feedback on their progress and demystify the grading process? Or will it confuse families and further burden teachers with its many areas of assessment?
I’ll leave it to readers to let us know.
The scores are great…as long as you don’t assess them beyond the State standards. Compare them to Sweden, Denmark, Singapore, etc. …not so much. But, our School Board doesn’t worry about that.
Teaching (and grading) to a standard is a road to homogeneity. Everyone can win! Is that life? What a joke.
We all know instinctively, that each of us is a unique individual with their own skills and capabilities. We are all our own height, weight, color and athletic talent. Yet we are to believe that a collaborative of “experts” in DC or Springfield can accurately assess what is an appropriate hurdle for all to jump. No higher than that is needed…no lower is possible.
Under the new grading system, the potential for ALL students to achieve an A is possible. This is akin to the IOC committee awarding a gold medal to all Olympic qualifiers. No one can lose. Amazing! Congrats to our School Board for finally achieving equality where none has ever been possible. This complex and inefficient grading system is a clerical change…not an aspirational one.
Some parents in California have rejected this system…their high-performing children declared, “we don’t have to work as hard for an A.” OMG. Paradise, right? Hard work? Nah. Wow! A’s for everyone.
This is a treacherous road. The School Board is confusing high State scores for true excellence. Why reach for the stars…when Springfield is good enough?
I like your assessment Scott, very intuitive.
I agree with you about the everyone has to win idea. Our whole society has this notion that losing is a bad thing. Every kid gets a medal type mentality. Losing teaches you how to persevere and overcome. Losing also teaches you what you excel at and what you need to work on. Not everyone is going to be a rocket scientist. We need many types of intelligence and skill sets to fit many roles in our society. We also need to kill political correctness!
I’m blown away that no one else has blogged about the report cards. Apparently, I’m in the minority (again) on sliding education in this neighborhood.
I had an interesting chat with a veteran teacher who acknowledged her struggles with the new card. While filling out the extensive criteria for a classroom of students is time-consuming, the greater difficulty apparently lies with assigning a letter grade. She also expressed concerns about how the new system would mesh with the high schools’ traditional approach to grading.
I don’t have a horse in this race — my kids are now beyond elementary school — but I would be interested to hear how parents are responding to standards-based reporting.
Maybe they are still wading through the enclosed PAGES of explanations and requests to not ask teachers about the new system but instead head to the 58 web site? All this to understand an elementary school report card?!
I had hopes that this new system would improve the targeting of student’s strengths and weaknesses. Sadly, the focus seems to be solely on testable, rather ISATestable, items with the bar set squarely on the mediocre peg.
Ingeniously it eliminates the need to differentiate learning for high achieving students. And disarm their annoying parents. Finished your work? Got a 100? Take a nap.
I imagine many parents will not complain as it just got a whole lot easier for little Jimmy to get an A. Kids quickly learn that it is not worth it to try too hard because an 89 is as much an A as a 99.
Other parents agree with your salient points Scott but, sadly, throw up their hands knowing parents really have no say in what goes on in the schools.
Buckle up. The Admin claims it is coming to high schools and colleges.. Maybe grades are over rated. How about Smiley and Frowny faces?
Elaine, apparently its going to be put into effect at Herrick next year.
Take the task of teaching kids how to learn, read, write, and do basic math; overlay Rube Goldberg principles and a federal bureaucracy, and you get NCLB. Since implementation the US has fallen further behind the rest of the world at a faster rate, as ST correctly notes.
That is what happens when you try to make everyone equal instead of providing everyone and equal opportunity! Big difference. NCLB needs to go! Give us our schools back and stop teaching to tests and standards.
I would rather tell the state and federal government we don’t need your stinking money. Raise my property taxes instead. I would gladly pay what ever it took in property taxes to get the government out of our education. Let me explain why. Currently we all pay into the tax system that reimburses our school districts for the funds it receives from the state and federal government. The problem is that the Chicago Public Schools get a bigger share than the suburbs. If we took that money we paid in and put it directly into our schools, the funding would be the same as it is now or better. It just makes sense. That way we would have more say into what our children our taught.