E's not for 'easy read' on new report card
By Eloise Aguiar
Advertiser Staff Writer
The state's new standards-oriented report cards have barely reached students' homes and already education officials know that changes will have to be made.
Deborah Booker • The Honolulu Advertiser
The cards being released at 10 pilot elementary schools last week and this week give parents, children and educators their first look at the report card of the future — complete with the new letter grades E, M, N, U and NA.
Joan Riggs reviews the new standards-based report cards with her children, Tori, 10, left, and Christian, 9. They are intended to provide parents with user-friendly feedback.
The cards are intended to provide a more comprehensive picture of how children are performing, and despite questions about what the new letter grades mean and concerns about how the grades will transfer to other schools, parents said they generally like what they see.
Children, some of whom said they are confused by the changes, equate the new report card with more difficult school work — and more of it.
"My teacher said we should try to meet the standards because if we don't we might get held back because they're real important," said Tori Riggs, a Maunawili Elementary School fifth-grader. "She said fifth grade was going to be harder than it was last year because we have all these new things to learn to meet the standards."
Her brother, Christian, a fourth-grader, agreed about the hard work. He also said he was confused by the report card, didn't know why the change was made and didn't know much about the new standards that are being implemented at schools — comments that echoed what many principals have heard from parents.
"I don't like (the new report card) as much as the other because it's harder to understand than just A, B, C," Christian Riggs said.
The new cards reflect the standards-based education that the state Department of Education has adopted to comply with the federal No Child Left Behind Act. And they're intended to provide parents user-friendly feedback — report cards that are easy to understand — as called for by schools superintendent Pat Hamamoto in her recent speech before a joint session of the Legislature.
In the past, parents had no clear idea what a student is supposed to learn or to what degree, said Kathy Kawaguchi, DOE assistant superintendent for Curriculum, Instruction and Student Support. The standards-based report card is an attempt to clearly define those areas.
The cards will be in all elementary schools by the 2006-2007 school year, said Mildred Higashi, report card coordinator for the DOE. Secondary schools will conduct a pilot program in the 2005-2006 school year.
• Progress Report: Given out twice a year at mid-semester, but that may change. Lists the content areas of reading, writing, oral communication, mathematics, science, social studies, fine arts, health, physical education. Teachers check one of five levels: more than adequate progress, adequate progress, some progress, little or no progress and not evaluated yet. • Status Report: Given out twice a year at the end of the semester, it lists the content area and under each a list of standards or performance indicators that are given the new letter grades. • General Learner Outcomes: Included in both the progress and status reports and indicate student's personal growth in areas of responsibility, cooperation, thinking, quality of work, communication and technology skills. Teachers assign numerical grades from one to four with four meaning consistently demonstrates and one is rarely demonstrates. New letter grades Letter grades on the Department of Education's new pilot report cards: E Exceeds proficiency M Meets proficiency N Approaches proficiency U Well below proficiency NA Not applicable at this time
Parents will learn if their children are exceeding, meeting, approaching or are well below proficiency in each standard listed on the card.
Glossary
However, officials noted that these first cards summarize much more than teachers can actually teach in a semester and said subsequent report cards will zero in on the essential standards.
"The standards and the benchmarks have remained the same; what we did was focus on which ones are absolutely critical," Kawaguchi said.
An initial Progress Report went out in November, but this end-of-the-semester Status Report has detailed descriptions of the standards for each subject, said Arlyne Yonemoto, principal of Maunawili Elementary School.
She and principals at the other pilot schools are hearing both negative and positive comments from parents: the letter grades are vague, expectations are clearer, the card is cumbersome and has too many pages and the grades don't equate to anything in the past.
Yonemoto said parents also expressed concern that the new system will make it difficult to transfer a student to another school that doesn't use the system. But she said the DOE is working to resolve many of these issues and has written a letter to private schools explaining the new system.
In a meeting last week, Maunawili parents learned that an "M" could mean "meets all standards" or "meets a majority of standards," and the school is still trying to decide how to deal with that issue, Yonemoto said. This time around parents will have to ask teachers what an "M" on their child's report card means.
Theresa Greaney, who has a kindergartner at Maunawili, said she thought is was odd to have two ways to interpret an "M" and she hoped the school will have that worked out by the end of the year. She also wanted to see specific standards for physical education, fine arts and health. All the other subjects had standards, but those do not.
Alvah A. Scott Elementary School principal George Lai said most parents find the new card easy to understand, though some said the new grades are too generic and difficult to relate to. They're comfortable with an A grade and often ask how the new letters relate to the old ways, he said.
Steve Nakasato, principal of Mililani Ike Elementary School, said parents are trying to understand the shift to standards-based grading from the old averaging and bell-curve system, but their questions are more specific to their child than the actual system.
One of the problems schools will have to address is standardizing the evaluation of student work across the board. Even now the pilot schools aren't all following the same grading procedure, Nakasato said. Grading guidelines must be clear about identifying what "exceeding" means, he said.
During this pilot period, Nakasato said, there will be inconsistencies in grading even within a school, but once the card is fine-tuned and the grading standards formalized, the information to parents will be more meaningful.
"The inconsistencies definitely outweigh the ambiguity of a single grade for a huge content area like mathematics and language arts," he said.
The new standards and cards also require changes in the classroom, placing an added burden on teachers.
At Maunawili, teachers are revamping courses to meet the standards and collaborating to ensure that lessons flow from one grade level to the next. On the same grade level teachers are developing evaluations that ensure consistency, said Ronnie Tiffany-Kinder, a sixth-grade math and language arts teacher.
"We don't just accumulate evidence," Tiffany-Kinder said. "We're assessing and giving them feedback all along based on whatever that standard is that we're teaching."
Under the old system, school work was graded and grades were averaged. Under the new system, students will be judged on their most recent work.
For Merrilyn Shinagawa, a sixth-grade science teacher, the new standards and report cards mean a new curriculum for her students. It was like starting from scratch, Shinagawa said.
"We now have to do electricity, magnets and magnetic fields," she said. "I didn't do that in the former curriculum."
Joan Riggs, mother of Christian and Tori, said she recognizes that the new system means added work for the teachers but it is better at assessing her children's progress. The old "D" or "C" letter grades didn't tell a parent where the child needs help, but the new cards do, Riggs said.
Reach Eloise Aguiar at eaguiar@honoluluadvertiser.com or 234-5266.
