By Nan Cooper / Staff

The Fulton County School System will be rolling out new elementary school report cards next year for kids in second through fifth grade. In addition to a letter grade, students will also receive a numerical grade in their core subjects. This move is the first output from a nearly two-year county project on Truth in Grading.

The reason for the Truth in Grading project, according to schools superintendent Dr. Cindy Loe, "is because there was concern that the grades that were being reflected on the elementary report card did not accurately align with what students know." She continued: "In fact, when we studied the issue initially, we found that almost everybody at elementary school got all As and Bs. But when they got to middle school, parents and teachers were surprised that these A/B students were not all A/B students at sixth grade." 

Principal Juanita Nelson from Hapeville Elementary explained elaborated.  "If a student gets a C on a report card, the parent wants to know if it's a low C or a high C." Was it almost a B or almost a D? It makes a difference in how the parent works with the student.

COMMON STANDARDS

A team of 41 teachers, principals, curriculum support teachers and central office staff members were asked to review Fulton's grading practices against five main points. Are the grades given to students consistent, accurate, meaningful, and supportive of learning? And if not, what needs to be done to get there?

Given a good set of grading practices, now every Fulton school is supposed to follow them -- to make sure that students changing schools are graded the same way county-wide. 

The new way of grading includes an emphasis on achievement and not effort, according to Dr. Linda Anderson, summing up the project in a presentation to the school board last week.

Her team suggested that work in school should count more than work at home. 

Tests, performance assessments, and in-school projects should make up about 40 to 50 percent of a grade, the Truth in Grading team suggested. Quizzes, at-home projects, and oral presentations should make up 20 to 25 percent. Class work should be 15 to 30 percent. Homework, matching existing guidelines, should be at most 10 percent.

HOMEWORK TIME

A welcome word to parents wading through pages of homework with their young children is a move towards making assigned homework time more consistent and in some cases more reasonable.

The team has recommended that all teachers follow the general rule of 10 minutes per grade.

And homework might come to count for nothing, under a recommendation soon to be made to the board:  that homework should be for practice only and not count towards the academic grade.

Anderson argued that homework should only be given once the standards are mastered and "should reinforce the skills that are taught in the classroom" and not be used to learn new material.

PILOTS IN NORTH FULTON

Also being piloted next year, are numerical grades for music, art, and physical education. Fifteen schools across the district will be participating in this pilot program. In North Fulton, Findley Oaks in Johns Creek will be piloting in Art, Crabapple Crossing in Milton and Lake Windward in Alpharetta will be getting the number grades in Music, and Mountain Park in Roswell and Summit Hill in Milton will be trying it out in P.E.

Numerical grades for these special area classes will be rolled out to the rest of the district in a future year, based on feedback from parents, teachers, and administrators.

POWER STANDARDS

In addition to adding numerical grades for all second to fifth graders in the core subjects, five schools will pilot a brand new report card similar to the current Progress Skills Checklist.

Northwood Elementary and Wilson Creek Elementary are the schools in North Fulton that will receive the new standards-based progress report cards in October. These report cards will include an assessment for each of the most important items in the Georgia Performance Standards for that grade, referred to as the "Power Standards".

Students will receive an "Exceeds Standard", "Meets Standard", "Does Not Meet Standard", "In Progress" or "Not Yet Assessed" for each Power Standard.  The assessment on the Power Standards in aggregate should, in theory, line up with the numerical grade that the student receives. So, if a student receives a 90 in Language Arts, then he shouldn't really have any, "Does Not Meet Standard".

With the new standards-based reporting parents should expect to start seeing more realistic report cards as early as second grade. This could be a mixed result as 7-year-olds start bringing home Cs instead of As. Parents will know sooner that their child needs help, but they will have to work harder to keep up that child's self-confidence amidst poor report cards.