In stark contrast to last spring’s heated discussion of proposed changes to the elementary school report card, this year’s report card committee is starting to move toward a common goal.

At a meeting Monday in the School Administration building, Assistant Director of Curriculum Anne Siesel offered the group a clean slate. On Nov. 20, the group went back and forth about the task. Problems that delayed the new report card implementation at the end of the last academic year were going to prove a challenge the second time around.

Since that meeting, a teachers’ workshop held on Dec. 2 dedicated to establishing grade level and homework expectations seemed to have made all the difference.

The primary concern of parents with the proposed report card was in the grading system and how a “rubric” grade translated to hard numbers. (Rubrics are an assessment tool used by teachers that is believed to be more accurate than letter grades.)

After the November meeting, Siesel asked parents, teachers and administrators to come back to the table with suggestions on how to grade and define proficiency. “The purpose of today’s meeting is to get back to the whole idea for the grading and rating systems,” Siesel said.

She explained that grading and proficiency are two distinct concepts, but felt that the other members were not interpreting the ideas in the same way. How those areas will be ultimately defined is still unclear but some consensus has been reached. The group has agreed that using sub-indicators (another grading tool) to explain grade level expectations is a positive step for students, teachers and parents. The all-day workshop yielded no change from the indicators used in the original proposal.

“With all those individual indicators, the purpose of that is to define proficiency; they’re not going to be graded because that is way too taxing for the teachers,” Siesel said.

The sub-indicators are specific to each grade, and define what a student is expected to achieve in the subject area.

In the third grade, for example, a student is expected to identify multi-syllabic words and write expressively in English Language Arts. The indicators help parents and students understand the grade in the overall subject, and are marked if the teacher feels there is a problem.

Monday’s meeting then focused on the rest of the proposed changes. Many parents and teachers continued to argue that the current system is ideal.

“If it has worked for decades, why are we fooling around with all this jargon?” asked Holliman teacher Linda Polselli. “The average is something that the kids can understand and the parents [can] get.”

Polselli also brought up the fact that the current report cards lack the equivalent of a failing grade. Without it, the schools are doing a disservice to students whose parents don’t understand that a poor grade could end up keeping the child back. Many members nodded in agreement, and Siesel said that would be brought up as the grading discussion continues.

“We don’t want to use any one assessment exclusively,” Siesel explained. “We will keep all the indicators, now it’s replacing the 4, 3, 2, 1 system that we had recommended initially.”

That numerical system would best suit the needs of students according to administrators, but parents feared their children would learn how to manipulate the system and do the least work necessary to fall into the broad-based “3” average.

“It felt more like a pass-fail to us and to our children. As kids, it doesn’t motivate them. It’s their report card, so it needs to speak to them,” said parent Laura Testa.

“We’re doing our students a disservice by complicating the grading system,” agreed fellow parent Ed Racca. “I would prefer something that is based numerically.”

Testa and Racca and a majority of parents felt the traditional grading (A, B and C) was the best fit. Administrators argue that the national trend is to get away from this black and white system though, and feel that restructuring education as a whole merits a change in grading.

“The thought of giving all kids a 3 just because it’s safe makes me cringe. You don’t want to encourage mediocrity but there’s more subjectivity across the board,” explained ELA Coordinator for the secondary schools Kathy Desrosiers.

She believes that education is shifting from traditional testing to interpretive learning and giving percentages can be more difficult and there is a need to accommodate levels of understanding and comprehension–things that can’t be graded with a number.

She also explained that using rubrics let teachers level the playing field for students. She said the cognitive demand needs to be equal across the board, and that while students with disabilities are handled according to their individualized education plans, they are essentially given the same tasks and are just able to modify the approach, such as being given more time, for example. She said the new report cards would be able to assess the depth of knowledge a student possesses rather than just their basic recall ability. “My dream report card is what the teachers are doing right now married to the proposed report card,” Testa said.

That’s exactly what the committee is on the track to do.

When Siesel asked for grading suggestions, one committee member brought up a system used by the Edmonton Catholic Schools in Canada. Their system, using A, B, C and N, lumps numeric percentages together and defines what levels of achievement are expected. While the group agreed that they felt the categories were too broad, they all wanted to use their proficiency definitions as a guide.

“The whole purpose of the grade level report card is to personalize it,” Siesel said, adding, “Teachers create rubrics all the time that are content-specific.” The idea of the rubric overall has many parents reeling though. They still fear that they are too broad and do not act as a motivator for students. At that point, Siesel presented a rubric she called the “Szymkowicz Model.” The model is named for math teacher Eileen Szymkowicz, who developed it. The model still uses a 1, 2, 3, 4 set-up, but each number has decimal versions, acting much like a minus or plus would with the old Carnegie units. By using decimals, the rubric covers the entire spectrum of grades rather than lumping students together in a 3, for example. Those rubric numbers then are converted into a numeral that goes into the teacher’s grade book and can be put on a report card as a Carnegie unit.

“This, to me, is a nice way to merge the two,” Siesel said.

Marrying the Edmonton model, a rubric can ultimately lead to the traditional grading parents have been calling for, with some tweaking. The committee seemed to feel it would be the best of both worlds.

“I think we’re on the right track,” Racca said.

Testa agreed, saying she thinks that using sub-indicators and proficiency language to personalize the report card, rubrics to define grading for teachers and then percentages and Carnegie units to explain the achievement to students and parents will work for all parties involved.

“As a parent, I am very grateful that the school department did indeed hear our concerns,” she said. “For me personally, today's report card meeting was the most promising yet.”

With the outline of the grading system out of the way, the committee must now nail down the details to implement the new system by next fall – which is what Siesel hopes to accomplish. The next teachers’ meeting will aim to define proficiency, which will be brought back to the committee for incorporation with the final product.