New report cards in SF: A-F grades get an O for obsolete

Report cards used to be simple — small cards with gold stars or check marks or letter grades to tell parents how their children were doing in math, reading, writing, social studies and maybe penmanship.

Not anymore.

Across the country, school districts are adopting comprehensive, multipage report cards that detail dozens of skills students should learn — and how close they are to learning them — rather than focusing solely on past performance on projects, tests or homework.

The movement to make report cards more dynamic underlines the enduring power of these essential, emotionally laden documents of childhood.

San Francisco elementary schools will roll out the newest incarnation of these standards-based report cards this month, with each elementary-school student across the district receiving about 50 grades on specific skills they should have by the end of the school year.

The idea is to focus on what students know and what they ought to know, rather than what they produce, said Jesch Reyes, supervisor in the San Francisco school district’s Achievement Assessments Office.

The district’s elementary-school report card includes more than a dozen skills for English language arts and language development, and more for math, history, social studies, science, health, physical education, and visual and performing arts. Students also get grades for “social-emotional development,” which includes playing well with others, regulating emotions and managing challenging situations.

The grading is on a scale of 1 to 4, with a 1 or 2 meaning students still need to work. Three means they can do it, and a 4 signifies that they exceeded the requirement.

Preschoolers, for example, should be able to write their first names by the last day of school. A first-grader should be able to tell time to the half hour. And third-graders, along with dozens of academic skills, need to know how to dribble a ball while moving and changing directions.

“I’m not just filling in a box for whether they can add and subtract,” said Hana Huang, a first-grade teacher at Miraloma Elementary School. “But can they understand and translate a word problem into a formula?”

The district has had these standards-based report cards for several years, but parents and teachers said they were confusing. The process to simplify the format started two years ago and has included community town halls, monthly task force meetings, requests for parent and teacher feedback, and efforts to replace esoteric language with simple concepts.

The old version: “Read and comprehend literature and informational texts within the instructional level expectations for the given trimester.”

The new version: “Reads at grade level expectations.”

The new report cards reduce the number of skills that are graded, while adding physical education. And they will now be translated into Vietnamese, Tagalog and Arabic, in addition to Spanish, Chinese and English.

The process was “an intentional move toward the spirit and intent of what a report card is intended to do,” Reyes said. “It’s a communication tool for how a student is doing.”

It is, however, a lot of work. Huang said filling out the report cards for her class of 21 students takes more than 10 hours. Still, the 15-year teacher doesn’t yearn for the days of checks and check-pluses.

“Before it was very general,” she said. “Nowadays we teach to the whole child. It shows how much is expected of teachers.”

Report cards for middle school and high school students continue to use a traditional format, with letter grades given for each course.

The standards-based elementary school report cards have been a bigger adjustment for many parents, who in their own childhoods took home note-card-size reports filled out with a handful of letter grades, bound for the front of the refrigerator if all was well.

“What I liked about it was that it was about mastering a standard rather than a really subjective A, B or C,” said Michelle Parker, who has three children in district schools, of the new report cards. “It was more like, can they do this thing? I liked that.”

She acknowledged, though, that she and other parents had to adjust their expectations for grades handed out in the first trimester of school. Now, students routinely get 1’s or 2’s because they are still learning the skills. They have until the end of the year to master them.

Despite the detailed rubric, there remains confusion about what the grades mean.

“What does it mean if they’re at a 1?” said Parker, who is president of the San Francisco Parent Political Action Committee, a nonprofit that helps families navigate public schools. “Did they finish that standard and they didn’t learn it? There’s not a complete story with those numbers.”

Miranda Martin, director of policy for Parents for Public Schools, which promotes San Francisco schools, was among the parents who reviewed the new report cards and concluded that they still aren’t perfect. What is also clear is that perfection is difficult given the strong feelings parents bring to this transaction.

“As a parent sometimes we’re like, I want my child to get all 4s all the time,” she said. “And I think the standards are still not so clear that reading them, you know exactly what (a child) needs.”

The pursuit will continue. But parents can now dig into a report card and see if their second-grader knows how to solve word problems involving dollars, quarters, dimes, nickels and pennies.

“I really wish I would have had that when I was teaching in Chicago,” Reyes said. “It’s a deliberate tool to triangulate where they need help and where they are achieving.”