BY DANIEL VICTOR
Of The Patriot-News
In Derry Twp. elementary classrooms, the A, B, C and D grade markings you know from your childhood have been expelled.
Now K-5 students strive for a P, which stands for proficient. If a student gets a W, or working toward proficient, that’s OK, too. That just means the student has more work to do. There are no other grades.
The new standards-based report card, modeled after about 30 other Pennsylvania school districts that have undergone similar changes, stops ranking students and focuses on progress toward specific benchmarks, said Cindy Goldsworthy, the director of curriculum and instruction in the Derry school district.
It gives parents feedback in more specific areas and separates factors such as work ethic and behavior from academic concepts and skills.
“This is to get kids, especially when they’re young, focused on what they’re learning much more so than the grades they’re earning,” she said.
Instead of getting a B with an 85 percent in math class, a fourth-grade student might have a P for “Rounds numbers,” but a W for “Renames fractions as decimals.” A boisterous student might get a W in “Demonstrates self control.”
There are 73 grading areas on the fourth-grade report card. On the previous report card, there were 10. The goal is to have a card full of P’s by the end of the year.
Other area districts have changed the way they grade in elementary schools. In 2004, the Northern Lebanon School District began using checks, pluses and minuses instead of traditional letter grades. The Eastern Lebanon County School District uses an “E” for exceeding expectations, an “M” for meeting them, and an “N” for “needing support.”
Reg Weaver, president of the National Educators Association, said there’s been a nationwide movement toward replacing traditional grading systems, but no consensus. Plenty of districts are experimenting, and it’s best for local districts to decide what works, he said.
Any way to give parents more feedback will be beneficial, he said.
“Once the kid knows the home and school is communicating and working together, in most cases you’ll see a difference in behavior, and you’ll see a difference in achievement,” Weaver said.
The impact is reaching into classroom lessons.
Fourth-grade teacher Brian Blase documents more data than he ever has before, but he won’t write scores or percentages on papers, he said. That data helps him direct his teaching at individual needs, he said.
During a geometry unit, one group of students was taken aside for a lesson on line segments. A few others got help on identifying right angles.
Students at elementary age are less motivated by grades than their older peers, and the new system helps him identify problem areas, Blase said.
“Even a student who got an A on the quiz, maybe they still don’t know how to draw a line segment,” he said.
The district is using just two letters to avoid the feeling of rankings, said Joe McFarland, principal of Hershey Primary Elementary School.
Some of the standards, designated by gray boxes on the report card, come from the state. Others are the district’s own.
Lori Dixon, principal of Hershey Intermediate Elementary School, said nonacademic factors are still important, though separate from academic achievement. They’ll be evaluated in a separate section, and misbehavior will be sternly talked about, she said.
But “it really should not muddy the issue of what this child knew and could demonstrate to me,” she said.
Parents and students will receive the first report card at the end of October, but the school is preparing parents for the switch. At a meeting with parents last week, the reaction was mostly positive.
Deborah Smith, who moved to Hershey from Binghamton, N.Y., said the former school district of her fifth-grade daughter used a similar system.
“This way you look at it, and you know the specific area you have to work on,” she said.
But Dana Bergey, the father of a fifth-grader, was skeptical.
“P is going to be ‘good enough,'” he said from the audience. “I don’t want my daughter to be good enough. I want her to be the best she can be.”
After the meeting, Bergey said he had feared the system catered to the lowest common denominator. But after a talk with McFarland, Bergey felt more optimistic, he said.
PTO President Ann Marie Schupper said she has already seen results.
Her fourth-grade daughter used to compare her grades to her seventh-grade brother’s, she said. This year, when her daughter brought home a spelling test with three questions wrong, she had a different response, Schupper said.
“She said, ‘I only have to learn these three,’ as opposed to ‘Oh, I have three wrong,'” Schupper said. “That’s really a great mind set.”