What You Need to Know About Your Children’s Report Cards
Parents: The school year is about to be half over, and you will soon be receiving your children’s report cards. If they are in high school or even middle school, it might be their first report card of the year. Younger students in elementary school will typically have received a report card after nine weeks of instruction and may have been given a progress report in the middle of a grading period.
A Look at Today’s Report Cards
Paper report cards are rapidly disappearing except in elementary school. Parents are now getting electronic ones emailed to them or have to access them online. Back when you were in school, report cards usually just had grades from A to F, absence, tardiness and behavior information. Plus, they may also have had brief comments from the teacher. Today, no matter what level your children are at, there are a variety of ways information about how they are doing academically is presented. Many schools still use numerical and letter grades; however, there is a newly popular kid on the block: standards-based grading. In this type of grading, a subject is broken down into smaller learning goals, which students should master by the end of a course. Each grade tells the level of mastery of a specific goal such as “addition of 2-digit numbers.” The grading scale indicates the mastery of that goal using numbers to indicate the achievement level: 4=advanced understanding, 3=meeting the required goal independently, 2=partial mastery, and 1=little or no mastery. It needs to be pointed out that effort and behavior are not factored into these grades as they may be in an A-F grading system.
A few schools have dispensed with grades entirely. Some show parents a portfolio of their children’s work instead. Others provide teachers’ thoughtful written evaluations of how students are progressing.
Fortunately, many schools have made it easy for parents to understand their grading systems. All parents have to do is go online to the school’s website for a very detailed explanation of the meaning of specific grades.
Do You Really Need Report Cards to Know How Your Children Are Doing in School?
Report card grades should not be a great surprise. Your young children usually bring home schoolwork every day, and the typical family ritual is to look it over with them. If their papers are not drowning in red ink, you have a pretty good idea that they are handling the academic side of school well. Of course, you can also see whether there are problems that need to be addressed with their teachers right away. Since teachers have largely abandoned grade books for storing grades online, more and more schools are letting parents go online and see right away exactly what their children’s grades are at any moment in time. Some schools only let students have this access to their current grades. Parents can request that their children let them see their grades and have meaningful discussions about them.
Are Teacher Comments on Report Cards Helpful?
The comments teachers make on report cards can be really helpful. You need to realize, however, that writing comments on report cards is very time consuming for teachers. It is especially difficult for special subject teachers (art, music, physical education) who may teach a great number of students. With the dawn of today’s online world, increasingly parents are receiving robo comments about how their children are doing instead of personalized messages. While this may be understandable, it is not always very helpful when parents want to know more about how their children are doing in school. If your children’s report card has a lot of check marks indicating possible problems, ask their teachers for an email, phone call or conference to discuss how they are doing.
A Report Card on Your Children’s Schools
The No Child Left Behind Act is no more. The new federal law for K-12 general education is the Every Student Succeeds Act. One of the provisions of this act is that every state and school district is required to publish report cards telling how the State, district and schools are doing with regard to student achievement and success. This includes how much is spent per student for every school, results of annual statewide tests in reading/language arts, math and science, state results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress reading and math assessments in grades four and eight, as well as assessments of how different subgroups of students are doing. The neat thing is that you can easily access this information on your school district’s website or request a printed copy of this information.
Even though your children may be doing well according to their report cards, it can be a real eye-opener to find out how well their school’s test results compare with the district average and the statewide average. These report cards also include information on suspensions, expulsions, school-related arrests, referrals to law enforcement, chronic absenteeism and incidents of violence (including bullying and harassment)—all information that will help you understand a school’s environment and culture.
Parents should send questions and comments to DearTeacher@DearTeacher.com and visit the DearTeacher.com website to learn more about helping their children succeed in school. ©Compass Syndicate Corporation, 2023
As always, please consult your healthcare provider with any questions or concerns.