No Letter Grades on New D157-C Report Card

Frankfort schools are planning to stop using traditional letter grade report cards for students in grades K-5 by 2016.

The Frankfort School District 157-C Board of Education discussed plans for a new report card and what it will mean for the district at a meeting Monday evening.

The changing approach to grading is part of a larger district-wide implementation of the Common Core State Standards. The standards are difficult to grade with a percentage, according to Director of Curriculum and Instruction Janet Goggins.

“It’s a shift for everyone,” Goggins said.

The district is currently in its third year of Common Core alignment and has rewritten its English and math curriculums to comply with the standards.

Under the Common Core, students are given one year to master a specific set of skills. The standards are the same across an entire grade level, regardless of whether a class is advanced or remedial. The new grading system will gauge a student’s mastery of each standard.

Currently, the district is in the research phase of developing the new report card. No major decisions have yet been made. Teachers have begun writing student assessments that align with Common Core requirements in order to establish comparable classroom-to-classroom grading.

The district plans to begin using the new grading system at Grand Prairie Elementary School during the 2014-15 school year. Grand Prairie currently does not use letter grades, so it is the most natural fit as a pilot school for the new report card.

The new system will be implemented at Chelsea Intermediate School in 2015-16. There are no plans at this point to incorporate the Common Core report card into the curriculum at Hickory Creek Middle School.

Board members expressed concern at Monday’s meeting about the potential parent response to the new system. Goggins said that in school districts where a similar transition had been made, parents demanding letter grades was the biggest hurdle in implementing the new grading system.

“Parents want feedback,” said Board Member Mike Turner, who also touched on the significance of providing parents with tangible evidence of their student’s level of academic success.

Superintendent Thomas Hurlburt said that it is important for the district to communicate with parents throughout the shift to the new report card system.

The board also addressed several questions about the Common Core report card that remain unanswered. These include concerns regarding what will happen if the school year ends and a student hasn’t mastered all the required standards for his or her grade or what to do if a student enters a grade with that grade level’s skills already mastered.

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