Nearly half of the county’s 10 public school district use some kind of standards-based report cards to measure student progress, limiting such measures to the elementary school level.
The standards-based method is nothing new, according to David Tobergte, associate director of Xavier Center for Excellence in Education.
“We’ve been trying to do this for a long period of time,” Tobergte said “Since the beginning of school reform (in the early 1960s), we’ve debating some of the issues surrounding the issue, which had led us to, today, Common Core, No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top.”
The core of that debate, when it comes to report cards or any other education-related issue, boils down to the influence of federal or state-related standards on education versus allowing teachers a more individualized type of approach.
“University folks like me, I used to be a principal and an assistant superintendent, we say it’s a balance and that we shouldn’t go either direction 100 percent,” Tobergte said. “There ought to be some individuality by the teacher and the school and the school district, at the same time keeping our eye on the ball at the national and state directives.”
Standards-based report cards can give parents and students a clearer picture of the progress a student is making toward mastering the specific skills and knowledge to meet the standards, according to Randy Oppenheimer, spokesman for Lakota Local School District.
When Lakota introduced its standards-based reports cards in the K-2 level in 2012, standards were broken down into “power standards,” the most important standards of various curriculum, according to Marlon Styles, the district’s executive director for curriculum and instruction.
“Power standards are the essential learnings for that particular grade level that students need to show mastery of in order to demonstrate preparedness for the next grade level,” Styles said.
Teachers can evaluate a student’s mastery of a standard by using 1, 2 and 3 grades, with a “1” grade indicating a standard not met, a “2” showing a student is very close and has shown very good progress toward mastering a standard and a “3” grade demonstrating mastery of a standard.
Standards-based takes more into account than whether a student completed a homework assignment or answered various questions in class, Styles said.
“This truly measures the mastery of standard for the sake of achievement,” he said.
Those who analyze the K-2 standards based report cards that are in place, will notice a vertical progression throughout, Styles said.
That progression “demonstrates not just mastery of power standards at one particular moment in time, but a progression toward mastery as the expectation for the skill and performance level of that standards begins to intensify as the grades start to accelerate and go higher and higher,” he said.
Not all standards are evaluated each and every trimester, Styles said.
Now, Lakota’s school board is expanding that system to third grade at Cherokee Elementary, fourth grade at Heritage Elementary, fifth grade at Endeavor Elementary and sixth grade at Woodland Elementary. The standards-based report card will be implemented in all second through sixth-grade buildings during the 2015-2016 school year, district officials said.
That’s a cause for concern for some parents, including Liberty Twp. resident Jaime Lyden, the parent of a third-grade son and a sixth-grade daughter.
Lyden worries that expanding the standards based report cards in Lakota’s elementary school as proposed would mean no way of acknowledging a student’s understanding is above grade level, Lyden said.
“Last year, on my son’s standard-based report card, he scored 3’s in the first quarter on several of the standards,” she said. “I assume it will be the same this year. Is there nowhere for him to go from there? That tells me very little about where he is in his learning.”
District officials say that when a student is meeting the expectation of skills and content identified at their grade level, the teacher will provide differentiated instruction in order to move the student beyond the identified benchmark to a deeper level of understanding or apply that knowledge to new situations.
Daily work completed by each child serves to clarify whether differentiation is needed to move the child beyond the grade level standard, officials said.
For Ross School District, which switched to the standards based report card in 2006 for grades K - 3, recognition of working beyond one’s level comes with the addition of the number “4” to indicated “working beyond grade level standards,” according to Superintendent Greg Young.
Grades 4 and 5 also have a standards based report card, but progress towards the standards are reported with traditional letter grades.
“The purpose is to have the report card more accurately reflect to the parent the progress each child is making towards mastering the state standards,” Young said. “The important standards are listed on the report card, so instead of receiving for example a “C” in the general category of reading, the parent can see exactly the student’s level of mastery for each reading standard.
“The teachers are using common assessments to determine student mastery of each standard area, so there is consistency between teachers and buildings with regard to student progress on meeting the standards.”
Other district to use standards-based report cards at some level include Talawanda and Madison school districts.
Talawanda has had a standards based report card for more than 10 years in the elementary, but the most recent revision to the report card aligned the new learning standards from the Ohio Department of Education and provided better content descriptors, according to district spokeswoman Holli Morrish.
“We are stressing to parents that the old A-F system compares students to each other, and the new system compares students to the standard,” Morrish said.
Madison Local School District for its elementary school uses a system that applies the specificity of standards-based report cards to the content of each subject via the letter-based model, according to district spokeswoman AJ Huff.
“For example, instead of just a grade for math, students receive grades for geometry, measurement, number sense, statistics and probability,” Huff said. “Although letter grades are given, they are based on the standards.”
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