NUMBERS DON’T CUT IT
When is a 2 satisfactory and when is it barely passing? That’s the question thousands of Calgary public school parents are asking themselves these days. With students in grades K to 9 now being assessed on a 1 to 4 scale on report cards, it’s become difficult to know if your child is holding their own or not.
“The report cards are awful. They don’t give me enough information as to how my kids are actually doing, what they’re achieving or what their levels of proficiency are,” Carolyn Chin, mother of three in grades 5, 6 and 8 told a Herald reporter last week.
Indeed. Without percentages, it’s difficult to know whether a 2 means the student only understands enough to pass or is doing well and just missed the cut-off for a 3. And it’s not like the information is forthcoming from the kids themselves. The answer to many parents’ query of “how was school?” is often a bland “fine.” Couple that with only two parent-teacher conferences a year, in November and March, and you have a lot of parents in the dark.
Jeannie Everett, CBE superintendent of learning, maintains the report cards do provide detailed information, particularly through written comments and outcomes, showing how a student is faring in a number of different areas in one subject.
“You don’t need a percentage to provide good information,” Everett said. “We encourage parents to have ongoing conversations with teachers throughout the year. Report cards should never be a surprise.”
CBE trustee Julie Hrdlicka said the new reporting scheme provides the board with better information. “We can actually see now, if a group of kids in a certain grade and in a certain subject are, say, getting a lot of twos, we need to address that.”
Well, wouldn’t classrooms full of kids getting 50 per cent tell you the same thing — in a much more alarming way? Parents say the report cards, and individual class assignments which are also graded 1-4, don’t provide enough information about a student’s strengths and weaknesses and how they compare to peers. And that is almost as important as the marks themselves. Is your child the only one getting 2s or is the entire class failing to understand the subject matter? If so, that would seem to be more a matter of how the material is being taught and not the individual student’s learning ability.
The lack of clarity is particularly concerning for kids in middle and junior high schools as they prepare for high school which give grades in percentages. Students in grades 8 and 9 and their parents need to know whether remedial work, tutoring or other help is required to ensure success in high school and beyond into post-secondary.
The CBE needs to return to clearer, more precise grading or it risks earning its own failing grade in communication.