What happened to ‘A’ for “Excellent!” and ‘F’ for “You don’t know this and you need to study it again”? These days, elementary school report cards are anything but elementary. I understand that there are philosophical reasons for not wanting to give elementary students the “old school” grades. I once attended an equity meeting where someone asserted that it is illegal to grade elementary students in California. If that is true, we are doing a disservice to our underperforming communities. These confusing report cards coupled with social promotion (passing children to the next grade when they haven’t mastered the current material) is having disastrous results. California is essentially leaving families and students in the dark about their academic progress for the first six to seven years of school and these are the foundational years.

I am in the business of helping families to understand how their children are doing in school and what they can do about it. I begin with the school report card. When I ask every family I work with to turn in their child’s report card, I’m blessed with the task of decoding at least ten different rubrics. I can’t imagine how these families feel.

The standards are listed in what I call “eduspeak” (because only teachers and educators understand it) and next to the standard is a letter or number. I stare at the report card legend to get some idea of what that letter or number means. For instance, in Writing, a student has a ‘P’ for “progressing” in using “a combination of drawing, dictating, and writing to compose a narrative”. Right.

Just to be clear, I’m not advocating for narrative style report cards either. I’ve read paragraphs upon paragraphs and still couldn’t determine what a child knew and didn’t know on a scale of zero to five.

Here’s the thing: There should be a report card that gives a summary in a straightforward manner that parents can understand. The summary report card should include the subject and the grade in that subject. For instance: Reading: B, Writing: B, Math: C. Attached to that summary report card is the more detailed report card that has the listed standards with an understandable ‘0’ to ‘5’ or ‘A’ to ‘F’ grade next to each. And the comments should always be written to give specific examples of what the child can and cannot do and the next steps as it pertains to that subject. It would be most helpful if all public schools used the same rubric. Is it too much to ask?