The Report Card

My oldest son came home last night and promptly stated, "my report card is in my backpack." Dropped his backpack and went to go read a book. I guess there are many responses I could have had. I could have immediately rushed to go read it, checked the markings, and seen all of the A's, B's, and C's. I guess. How would I feel if I did? Would I be more or less proud of my child because of it? Would I know more about my child from it? Would I have any idea of what to do with my child based on what it said? Would the results have been the same if he had a different teacher? What do those results even really mean?
The report card, a checklist of marks that rank our children in various ways to there peers. Given in content areas that date back to before I was born. Sure, schools have tried to evolve it over time. Schools have tried to make it less subjective, using "standards-based" reporting methods. They have tried to make it more fair by using more or less homework, more or less effort grades, more weighting at the end of units to allow time for learning. Yet, it seems that what we are truly doing is trying to take an inadequate communication and reporting system and placing it on high-quality pretty paper with a nice scent.
For a while I joked by saying, "How important is a fourth grade report card? or Who even knows where their report card is?" I did that until one of my best teachers sent me a picture of her third grade report card. Cracked me up. She knew where it was. She and her parents valued it. It made me laugh. It also made me think, we need to do this better.
I look at my fifth grader and see that he is my dad in so many ways. My dad taught himself to read at late 2 early 3. He's the guy who skipped a grade in school, did all of the work, ranked ridiculously high in high school and went to University of Chicago to be an Astrophysics major. He marched to the beat of his own drummer and was driven to do well. What report card could his teachers give him that showed the knowledge he gained in the class? What report card would have informed his parents on what he needed to learn next? He walked into school and if evaluated by knowledge and performance standards compared to his peers, one could mark straight A's the day he entered and been done with it. If we used age-level standards-based reporting, his parents would have looked at the document the day entered the class and wondered why he was there as he could do every one of the skills at mastery level the day he entered the classroom. How could the report card be a meaningful tool?
I look at my fifth grader and he is me in so many ways also. When he does his work at times it is the absolute bare minimum. The writing is fragments, showing that he has the knowledge but would rather go onto something else that is more interesting and challenging than waste time writing more. His worksheets and tests are done quickly, showing the tiny errors that make it a B or B- not because he doesn't know it but more because he didn't bother to learn all the little minutia surrounding a topic or detail and didn't spend the time reading the whole thing because he wanted to back to his book or his game. The stuff he did read on the paper, he remembers for ever.
I look at the backpack containing the report card and realize his teacher agonized over all of the markings on the document. She, like so many others, spends hours making sure the report card is "accurate" and "fair." She wants to show his strengths and growth areas on a document that is quite frankly inadequate. A document that isn't fair to the learner, the instructor, or the parent. I really like his teacher and feel bad for her.
It's time that we rethink our reporting mechanism. Leaving the rankings of the letter grades is a start. They are subjective in every way. They are subjective by the cohort of students, the subjectivity of assignments, the questions on the assignments, extra-credit, and the ridiculous scale of 90-80-70. Letter grades are not comparable teacher to teacher none the less school to school. Moreover, why is remembering 90% of the content important. Will that help you ten years from now? Standards-based learning is a start. It lets us know a little about what the child is working on. However the standards themselves are just steps in a much bigger ladder. We have children each year that walk into classrooms and will never meet the "grade-level" standards and others that walk in and can do everyone of the "grade-level" standards the first day. These tools tell us only a little more than the letter grade ranking system before it. What we really need is a standards-based ladder report card. One that looks at curriculum vertically, perhaps k-16, and marks where a child is at with spaces underneath it for what that child needs to learn next. One that looks in Geometry and identifies the skills a child has and gives the parent an idea of what to work on going forward. We need to leave the age-modeled factory design and instead embrace a meritocracy that identifies how we can grow and improve.
When that report card shows up, I can do something with it. I can guide my child on activities to work on and skills to improve. Until then, I think I'll look at the work he has brought home this week and go do the dishes. Conferences are on Monday and I'll listen to the teacher's perspective. She's fun and she get's it. Those are the valuable things. His mom can read the report card when she gets to it, if she wants to.