Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/11437
When the West Contra Costa Unified School District adopted standards-based grades for ele- mentary schools, report cards became m ore co nfusing f or teachers, students and parents, says Gig Jenkins, a second-grade teacher at Grant E lementary School in Richmond. Numbers replaced letter grades, with 1 showing that a student needs im- provement; 2 showing the student ap- proaching the standards; 3 showing the student meeting benchmarks; and 4 showing that the student is advanced. Instead of being graded overall on sub- jects, s tudents a re graded on many standards within core subjects. Jenkins was part of a committee that helped create the report cards measur- ing student progress toward meeting state standards. With so many stan- dards, not all were included. “We used our district ‘power stan- dards,’” recalls Jenkins, a member of 10 California Educator | MAY 2010 t h e U n i t e d Te ac h ers o f Richmond. “Our co mmi t t e e looked at report cards from oth- er districts with standards-based report cards and cre- ated our own.” The report cards are confusing and are not particularly parent-friendly, says Jenkins. “Many people, including myself, believe the standards-based language of the report cards is geared more toward guiding teachers than in- forming parents.” Parents are baffled by such things as a math standard that evaluates students on their ability “to use the commuta- tive and associative rules to simplify mental calculations,” or a language-arts standard that determines whether stu- dents “decode phonetic patterns — plu- rals and diphthongs.” “When they first came out, I basi- ABOVE: Second-grade teacher Gig Jenkins at Grant Elementary School in Richmond — a school that has replaced letter grades with numbers. LEFT: Second- grade students at Grant Elementary School. cally would spend all my time in par- ent-teacher conferences exp laining what this stuff means,” says Jenkins. “Now many parents and students are just looking for numbers and not look- ing at standards individually. If stu- dents get mostly 2’s and 3’s, they know they are doing okay.” Report cards, she adds, need to be modified so that they are easier to understand and less time- consuming for teachers to fill out. It takes hours to complete the legal-sized report cards. Teresa Basin, a second-grade teacher at Rail Ranch Elementary School in Murrieta, also finds standards-based report cards to be extremely time-con-