This year, as elementary schools in Montgomery County, Md., began incorporating the Common Core into their math and English/language arts lessons—as well as other subjects with the new science and social studies literacy components—the district took the opportunity to make report cards more reflective of student progress on the Common Core standards, the Washington Post reports.
The new system doesn’t use traditional letter grades for elementary school students, such as A, B, and so on. Many educators find those to be arbitrary, especially when assessing very young students. Rather the new system uses four codes: ES for “exceeds standards” (I think), P for “demonstrating proficiency,” I for “in progress,” and N for “not yet making progress or making minimal progress” toward meeting standards.
Some parents, whose children normally bring home something close to “straight A’s,” are complaining a little, or at least they want to know more about the new report card marks. It seems, with the new system, even the top students in the class receive only a few ES marks on their report cards.
The new marks, it should be noted, reflect the skills and processes in the Common Core. Instead of measuring students based on what percentage of tested facts they can memorize, the Common Core demands that students apply their knowledge to new situations, synthesize information or connections between known information, and analyze new and unique situations where that knowledge applies.
With that in mind, I would expect students whose straight A’s taught them they were good in school to fall short of receiving as many ES’s on the new report cards as they used to receive A’s on the old ones. The new system is reporting about something that is quite different from what the old system reported on. What I don’t understand, though, is a claim reported in The Post by one third-grade teacher: “It is statistically impossible for a child to be ES across the board. It should be,” she said.
Statistically impossible? As in zero students received straight ES’s? That’s easy enough to check, I suppose, but even if it didn’t actually happen this year, to say something is “statistically impossible” is a bit dramatic. It sounds too good to be true.
As a result, I have no idea where this theory came from. Are teachers under the assumption that it is statistically impossible for any student to receive marks of ES on every standard? Have they been so instructed by district personnel? Because if that’s what happened, that would be newsworthy!
In other words, if a student gets 100 percent on every assignment for every standard, is that only a P? If that’s what it takes to perform according to the standard, why do officials even provide a mark of ES? On the other hand, if getting everything right—by which I mean demonstrating synthesis, analysis, and application of the material learned, as the Common Core demands—why is it statistically impossible to get all ES’s?
So while Montgomery officials try to explain this one a little better to parents, we have to point out that Montgomery County also dropped the narrative portion of elementary students’ report cards this year—you know, those few sentences in which teachers can explain how a student’s doing, in plain English and without resorting to coded symbols like A or ES. Plain English is better, since many people wonder if teachers even know the real meaning of letter grades or these new marks.
By eliminating this portion of the report card, district officials have removed yet another opportunity to better explain the marks to parents, and they seem to be getting exactly what they deserve: a whole bunch of parents raising questions and newspaper articles that aren’t quite sure what to report.
