El Dorado Schools to continue Standards Based Reporting

The El Dorado School District is continuing to implement the Standards Based Reporting (SBR) method of grading with students going into second grade.

SBR doesn’t use the grading system most people are used to, but rather scores of one, two or three. The district sets different standards for each grade level with the goal at the end of the school year for students to be scoring a three on every standard.

“What do grades tell us? If a child’s got an 85 percent, we think that well that’s probably pretty good,” said Tom Simmons, District Math Chair. “But it didn’t do a very good job of telling the story of exactly what the student had mastered and what they hadn’t mastered. You could be a B student for a lot of different reasons. You could be an A student for a lot of different reasons.”

With the SBR form of grading, the report cards sent home every nine weeks are broken down to show the different standards for that year. Not every standard is assessed every nine weeks, and once a student achieves a three they’re not assessed again. However, they’re all on each report card.

Students are given assessments to test each of the standards, but that is the only grades they’re given over the course of the year.

“I think this is one of the great advantages of using this system,” said Jeannie Strother, District Literacy Chair. “You don’t see that (test anxiety) because they’re really being assessed informally. With that formal assessment, the students don’t even necessarily know that it’s a test.”

First grade standards for math include goals such as counting to 120, add and subtract within 20, be able to tell and write time, and complete word problems whose sum is less than 20. Meanwhile for literacy, students are expected to recall key details from stories, use singular and plural nouns to match verbs, and use proper capitalization.

While the goal is for all students to reach a three for every standard, when a student moves to the next grade level their new teacher will get their last report card to be able to address any areas where the student was still scoring a two.

“Learning take place continuously in a lot of schools,” Simmons said. “Instruction’s a little bit different in that respect. Then the teacher monitors daily so students become more and more proficient."

When looking at implementing this system at El Dorado, Assistant Superintendent Ronda Simmons and other local educators visited other districts such as Warren and Bryant to get an idea of how the system could work.

It is currently being implemented throughout the elementary schools in the district. A group of students were introduced to it when they started kindergarten and the process has been following that group as they move up through the system.

The system is still developing and changing with input from teachers who are actively teaching using the system. While the standards typically won’t change during a year, teachers from each grade level meet four times a year to give reports on successes and struggles with the program.

“Their (teacher) input has been very valuable to us moving forward and even in the course of a year,” Strother said. “As we’re looking at something, if they feel that we don’t need to do this particular assessment, we need to do something else, then they know through their formative assessments that they’re ready for something then we’ll try to come up with something else. It’s ongoing and it is fluid.”

As students continue to move up through the school system, administrators are still working on figuring out how the system would work in high school or with college applications.

“I think it depends on how for we continue to go with Standards Based Reporting,” Strother said. “To my knowledge, that hasn’t been decided. Because we’re still new into it, we really look at how well it really is at marking where we are. What becomes really difficult is making those assessments that test only one standard. We’ll just have to see how we shift that and how far we take that up.”