Why some Phoenix middle schoolers wanted letter grades

A month after students in west Phoenix’s Cartwright Elementary School District said they wanted to see traditional letter grades on their report cards, the district’s governing board voted to adopt the change.

Students in the district’s Superintendent Scholar Council told the board in April that they wanted seventh and eighth grade students to be graded on an A-F letter grade scale. Currently, students are assessed on a scale from minimally to highly proficient.

Traditional letter grades would help middle school students and their parents better prepare for the transition to high school, students told the board. Cartwright is a feeder district to the Phoenix Union High School District, which largely grades students on an A-F scale.

Cartwright students on the council conducted surveys and found that 75% of surveyed teachers and 75% of surveyed seventh and eighth graders wanted to adopt the change. A majority of principals wanted letter grades, too. Parents were more split, according to the student surveys, with about 54% saying they disapproved of the current grading system and wanted a change and 46% saying they approved of the current system.

Students presented their vision of what the transition to letter grades could look like, with “highly proficient” translating to an A, “proficient” translating to a B or C, “partially proficient” translating to a D and “minimally proficient” translating to an F.

Some students said they thought that letter grades were easier to understand, according to the survey results presented at the April meeting. One teacher’s response to the survey stated that the proficiency scale is confusing to students. “They respond to the A, B, C, D, F scale and want to strive for an A or B,” the teacher wrote. “When they have a PP or MP they always ask me what that means.”

The board voted Thursday to adopt a change to the grading policy, establishing an A-F grading system for its seventh and eighth graders. The change will go into effect next school year, according to district spokesperson Victor Hugo Rodriguez.