Calgary’s new grades: evident and emerging

CALGARY • The Calgary Board of Education is moving to save children from failure. Under a proposed new marking scheme, the board is to relabel such students as “support required.” If they improve, their skills will be upgraded to “emerging.’’

The Calgary board is doing away with letter-grade assessments for children between Kindergarten and Grade 9, and is also eliminating personalized comments. On a draft of the new report card protocol, traditional letter grades and percentages have been replaced with a four-point system: “exemplary,” “evident,” “emerging” or, “support required.”

School official hope the assessments will offer additional precision, but critics don’t buy it. ‘‘I’m still searching for the benefit to the children,’’ argues Peter Cowley, director of school performance studies at the Fraser Institute. He said phrases like “evident” or “emerging” don’t seem to give parents any clearer understanding than a letter grade.

“A lot of things that are happening in education are happening for political reasons. It’s happening with little demonstrable benefit to students.”

The classifications will be offered under such rubrics as ‘‘math reasoning,’’ or “communicates effectively through listening and speaking,” said Ronna Mosher, the board’s education director.

“If you know as a parent that your child has received 82%, it’s very difficult to know what to do to help them,” she said.

The new report cards will drop personalized comments that have long hampered teachers’ timetables with additional written assessments. The board said teachers will provide parents with feedback ahead of report cards: parents and principals will create communication plans to connect more often.

The standardized notices are expected to be given to parents twice per year by September, 2014. Under the old system, schools offered between three and six reports annually.

The new report card has its origins in the trendy Formative Assessment theory of marking: teachers are casting themselves more as coaches than taskmasters. Studies have shown giving students ongoing feedback on their work is a more effective way of improving teaching than rewarding work with grades. The latest education research suggests that report cards don’t do much good anyway, said Jim Field, an associate professor with a specialization in assessment at the University of Calgary’s faculty of education. “The education research says this, that grades don’t communicate really well with parents,” he said. “What does an A in Language Arts in Grade 3 mean? What can that student do with the language? Can they comprehend the text well in terms of concrete, real world skills? What does that mark mean?” Mr. Field said the new assessments should give parents a better understanding of how well their child is actually doing. “When you send a report card home, how do you know parents understand it?” he asked.

Yet Mr. Cowley said he feared proof that the changes will improve outcomes is lacking.

“If this is more clear to parents, presumably they’ve done studies to show that this is the case. They’ve compared the old standard and the new standard and can say, ‘Oh, these new sets of outcomes and descriptions are more informative than the old ones,’” he said.

In the 2010-11 school year, Ontario’s school boards changed their report cards. Elementary students are now given a progress report card in November that omits letter grades and percentage marks. However, districts still give out more traditional report cards twice per year. Quebec also revamped its report cards, reducing the number of formal notices and simplifying reports for parents. Meanwhile, school boards in Vancouver offer only comments up until Grade 3. After that, teachers offer letter grades and comments.

Jeff Bowes, president of the Calgary Association of Parents and School Councils, said that while it would be a good thing to see report cards standardized across schools, he’s concerned that dropping personalized comments from report cards will just result in less feedback altogether.

“Right now, I don’t even have my teacher’s email address,” he said. “They want to try to move to a system where teachers are trying to make relevant comments on more of a real-time basis when something becomes an issue, instead of waiting for the report card to come.… In theory that sounds great, but unless you have really strong processes backing that, I have concerns about that.”

Absent a solid deadline, Mr. Bowes said regular feedback may fall by the wayside.

Difficult to know how to help them

Frank Bruseker, president of the Calgary Public Teachers’ Local 38, said that under the old system, some teachers were spending up to 50 hours to prepare report cards for their class. The personally written commentary was “quite lengthy.”

“There was up to 500 words of comments which is more than a typed page of material. And if you’re doing that for every student under your direction, talking about their growing and personal development and citizenship and add in all the other courses, it takes a lot of time,” he said. Mr. Bruseker said time spent on assessments could be better directed toward preparing lessons, evaluating new material or just marking the assignments students did that day. It is easier and more efficient to just talk to parents about potential problems than to wait for a written report home, he said.