By Patrick Boyle
© The Washington Post
April 3, 2001

My four-year-old recently brought home his first report card. Judging by the assessments of the highly trained and insightful educational professionals at his preschool, Alec is on the road to Rhodes. He shows proficiency in handling paste/glue, shares toys and materials, exhibits problem-solving skills, and goes to the bathroom without help.

Lucky boy got my genes; I do all of those things, too. In return for his outstanding achievement, I slip the kid a twenty. Actually, my wife and I don't even tell Alec that he got a report card. He thinks school is just fun, blissfully unaware that adults rate his performance there. We'll make him uptight about school later.

But what about the really important people here--us? What do report cards tell parents when our kids are very young? What do they tell us as our kids get older?

As the father of a 14- and a four-year-old, I wanted some simple guidelines on what report cards really mean. I made the mistake of asking educators; they say it's more complicated than we think. Grades have different meanings for different people, said Bruce Katz, a former Prince George's County principal and now director of curriculum and instruction for the school district.

For starters, parents typically see report cards differently than do the teachers who fill them out. Grant Wiggins, a national report card consultant to schools (see, it's complicated), says teachers tend to see report cards as reflections of each child's development, taking into account his abilities and his progress toward meeting individual goals. Parents see report cards as scores that tell them where their kid's stand compared to the other kids in their group. We want to know if our children are average, falling behind, or headed for scholarships.

Thus I'm excited when Alec brings home along with a piece of art he made from a paper towel tube the American education system's first official assessment of him, the start of two decades of reports that will largely determine his career options and whether he'll make enough money as an adult to leave us alone. But there are no A's, B's, and C's; most children in the Washington area don't get those until third or fourth grade. Before that, the report cards are more developmental, says Dottie Mangle, assistant superintendent of instruction for the Carroll County, MD school district. There's a lot of focus on process, such as progress in connecting letters to sounds, rather than on what a child knows.

Alec's card lists skills marked with letters such as M for mastered, P for progressing, and N for not yet (the latter being the option I wish my 10th grade trigonometry teacher had chosen instead of D). Our children's first report cards are gentle on parents: They aim to assure us that our kids are coming along fine, or to warn us about severe problems. But I can't help feeling foolishly proud that Alec earned the highest letter on 44 of the 45 skills. He must've been tired when they tested scissors (progressing toward cutting on a curved line).

Compare that with my eighth-grader's report card. In sizing her up, the education system has abandoned almost everything it considers important in assessing her brother. While my son wins high marks for 'copes constructively with frustration,' my daughter's report makes no room to weigh her social and emotional development. Where Alec's card lists only eight intellectual skills (such as recognizes letters), Alyssa's card consists entirely of six class subjects and phys-ed, with letter grades.

My middle schooler has entered the zone where kids are being evaluated on how well they can apply their learning, Mangle says. The evaluations are much more specific to the acquisition of knowledge and skills.

The A's and B's on my daughter's card make me comfortable: They are precise measures of achievement, like a batting average. As per the family custom, we take Alyssa to dinner to celebrate her good report card. But after spending hundreds of dollars on crab legs over the years, I read Margaret Pfaff, Carroll County's director of elementary schools, telling the Education World website, letter grades do not accurately represent a student's progress nor do they convey much meaning.

She seems to be in the majority among educators, who scorn the letter grades they issue as vague and subjective. In 1995 Carroll County replaced letter grades in some schools with detailed explanations about each student's progress toward mastering various skills under each subject. Many parents reacted as if they'd been handed butterfly report cards. Carroll abandoned its experiment after three years, joining Seattle, San Bernadino, Gloucester, Mass., and other districts that returned to letters after furious parents demanded to know: Where does my kid stand?

We want to open the report cards and immediately know if we're going for crab legs tonight. Teachers want to give us detail and nuance about our kids, perhaps to discourage us from having more kids. Charles County is trying a compromise this year: Grade schoolers get a skills checklist for the first two years, then move on to letter grades for subjects, supplemented by scores for 40 skills (Under Reading Skills: "Applies word attack system.") So far, parents are handling the change without tutors.

The county stuck with traditional letter grades for middle school and high school, the latter being where report cards complete the shift toward measuring academic knowledge and achievement. Starting in high school next year, my daughter's effort and progress will matter less than ever. What will matter is her ability to cram facts about the Ming dynasty into her brain at night and find them there the next morning.

Now I see that our children's report cards are a complex and interrelated series of measurements that, when taken together, will fill a small a box in the garage. They are vague, yet useful indicators that help us see if our offspring are on course to succeed or need adjustment. That is why this Saturday, Alec watches no Clifford the Big Red Dog until he overcomes his deficiency with scissors. Maybe we'll use them to attack words.