Parents at three elementary schools in the Fort Worth Independent School District got their first look at a new grading system earlier this month — one that doesn’t use the letter grades parents and students are used to seeing on report cards.
Fort Worth ISD is piloting a new standards-based grading system this year at three elementary schools: Christene C. Moss, Luella Merrett and Alice Carlson Applied Learning Center. Eventually, district leaders hope to roll the new model out across all elementary schools.
Fort Worth ISD released its first round of report cards for the year on Nov. 7, and held parent-teacher conferences the following week. Teachers and school leaders say parents were receptive to the new grading system.
Standards-based grading is an approach to student evaluation that gives parents a list of skills students are expected to master within each subject area, and a numerical rating indicating how well students are performing on each skill. Generally, standards-based systems use a 1-4 scale, with a score of 1 indicating the student has little to no proficiency on that skill and a 4 indicating the student has shown advanced mastery.
Aura Angel, principal at Luella Merrett, said teachers have worked since last summer to build a grading system in which they can outline how well students are doing on each skill and concept they’re supposed to master this year.
The new system gives parents a better look at how their kids are doing academically, she said. In the past, if a student got an 85 in one subject, parents might have a rough idea of what that number meant, but they wouldn’t have any way of knowing what individual skills their child had mastered within that subject area, and where they needed extra help, she said.
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Even if the new grading system is a better alternative, it still represents a major shift away from what parents are used to seeing on their kids’ report cards. So over the first few weeks of school, teachers and campus administrators met with parents to explain the new system, Angel said. They showed parents an old letter-based report card alongside a new standards-based report so they could get a better idea of how the two corresponded. Almost universally, parents liked the new system better, Angel said.
“I did not get much pushback at all,” Angel said. “The parents felt that with standard-based grading, they have a clear understanding of how to help their child at home.”
Terry Campbell, a kindergarten teacher at Luella Merrett, said the families she works with responded well to the new grading system during last week’s parent-teacher conferences. The main advantage is that, where the old system gave students a single grade for an entire subject, the new one breaks subjects out into smaller chunks of learning, she said. The system is aligned with state standards, so parents get a clear idea of how their child is performing compared to the skills and knowledge they should have mastered at their grade level, she said.
Grades don’t tell the whole story on student performance
Recent research suggests that there’s a wide disconnect between how parents think their kids are doing academically and how students are actually faring in school. Last spring, 84% of Tarrant County parents thought their kids were on grade level in math and reading, according to polling data from the Fort Worth Education Partnership. But only 52% of students in the county met grade level standards in reading on the most recent STAAR exam, and only 43% did so in math.
Trenace Dorsey-Hollins, director of the education advocacy group Parent Shield Fort Worth, said she’s excited to see the district rolling out the new grading model. Fort Worth ISD’s shift to the new grading system came after Parent Shield’s advocacy for greater transparency around the district’s academic performance.
The problems with a letter-grade system go beyond the fact that it lumps entire subject areas into a single grade, Dorsey-Hollins said. Students’ grades often include factors like attendance and class participation that don’t pertain directly to how well a student has mastered the material they’re supposed to learn in class, she said. That can artificially inflate grades, leaving parents with the impression that their kids are doing well in school when they’re actually struggling, she said.
Transparency around academic performance is even more important now, as Fort Worth ISD faces a state takeover due in large part to years of lackluster student progress, Dorsey-Hollins said. Although she’s optimistic about the takeover and hopes it will be the change the district needs to begin moving in the right direction, she said Fort Worth schools need strong partnerships between parents and teachers if they want to improve. Before those partnerships can take root, parents need clear, understandable information about how their kids are doing in school, she said.