Report Card Redux

School Administrator, Nov, 1999 by Howard Libit

The quest for better ways to communicate what students know means abandoning jargon for dots, dashes, even X's and O's

Some use slashes and checks, X's and O's. Others tell the story using E, S and NS. And while A, B, C, D and F have worked just fine for traditionalists, many are just now rediscovering those basic letters.

Schools, districts and states across the nation are scrambling to find ways to illustrate how they and their students are doing. In the process, they are creating a dizzying array of report cards on everything from individual student progress to comparisons of schools, districts and states. Few wind up looking alike.

For most, the efforts to create new report cards are driven by the push for tougher academic standards. When a state or a school district creates new benchmarks for student performance, a brand new form is immediately needed to tell the results.

But educators across the country also say they're trying harder than ever to do a better job of communicating with parents and the public. That means setting aside comfortable jargon and finding a new vocabulary that can be easily understood by non-educators.

Sacred Cows

The bottom line, say those who have undertaken report card revisions in the past few years, is that making a new report card is never easy, regardless of whether it's intended to grade kindergartners or entire school systems.

"Report cards tend to be sacred cows," says George Wetzel, who recently retired after 31 years in the Corpus Christi, Texas, Independent School District. "When you start talking about making revisions, people start getting worried."

So about three years ago, when Corpus Christi administrators decided it was time to create a set of new report cards for kindergarten through 12th grade, they knew they had a big task on their hands.

In 1993, the district, I which has 42,000 students in five high schools, 12 middle schools and 40 elementaries, started rewriting its academic standards. Dozens of benchmarks on student progress were created for every grade level, bringing the district's standards in line with those approved for use throughout Texas. Then it came time to create the new student report cards.

First, a committee was appointed, and Wetzel, who was planning to retire from his job as assistant superintendent, was charged with overseeing the effort. Teachers, school administrators and parents were all involved, and they quickly decided it was critical to keep the standard measure that Texas requires for student progress: numerical scores for grades. If students do not achieve at least a 70, they don't pass.

The big change was the decision to start breaking out the standards on the report cards. But the challenge was to find a way to specify standards without making things too complicated for parents and without creating too much additional paperwork for teachers. What Corpus Christi ended up with was one of the most comprehensive report cards in the nation.

Broken down by grade levels--1-3, 4-5, 6-8 and 9-12--the backs of the report cards list the skills that students are expected to achieve. Now, for each subject area, there are as many as 15 standards in which teachers must report whether students have achieved the performance standard, are making progress toward the standard or failed to meet the standard.

For example, students in Corpus Christi's high school English III class must be able to meet seven standards:

* Write a coherent expository essay;

* Write within a 45-minute period a coherent expository essay;

* Conduct research;

* Read a variety of prose and poetry;

* Analyze a given literary work;

* Analyze a given nonfictional work; and

* Prepare a coherent oral presentation.

Similar sets of standards are listed on the back of Corpus Christi's high school report cards for other English classes, as well as math, science, history and economics courses.

To ease the burden on teachers, a skill once successfully completed must only be recorded a single time. After that, the skill automatically shows up as having been achieved for the rest of the year.

"We spent hours and hours working on the wording of those standards, trying to make them as clear as possible to parents," Wetzel says. "The whole point of the report card is to be a tool to communicate with parents how their children are doing, and it doesn't do that very well if they can't understand what the standards mean."

Most educators involved in revising report cards say that making them understandable to parents and the public--while adding to their value in the hands of teachers and administrators--is their top priority these days.

Self-Grading

It's at times uncomfortable for central-office personnel to compile statistics and other information knowing that the data will be used unfairly to compare one school system to the next by the news media, real estate firms and opportunistic critics of public education. But providing such details is now an expectation in the late 1990s, driven by the Internet's immediate access to almost unlimited information about anything.