Whitfield County elementary school students getting new report cards

Rachel Brown

Third-graders in all 13 Whitfield County elementary schools will come home this coming school year with detailed report cards with grades on a scale of 1 to 4 rather than the use of percentages.

The old report cards provided an overall numerical average for each subject, but the new report cards will break down the students’ latest achievements in several different categories to show how well they’ve mastered specific concepts. Math, for example, is broken down into 14 areas including addition/subtraction, division, geometric figures and data analysis.

School improvement coordinator Dee Goodwin said the new system is a response to the Georgia Performance Standards, the state curriculum that has been revamped for the past several years to focus more on what educators call “performance-based learning.” Such learning relies on activities that require a demonstration of knowledge — creating a video about Julius Caesar’s life, for example — while traditional methods focus more heavily on memorization — answering multiple-choice questions about Caesar’s life.

“These (new) concepts did not mesh with the traditional report card, and it was no longer a good fit for how we wanted to report the progress students were making,” Goodwin said.

New Hope and Beaverdale elementary schools were chosen to pilot school-wide projects using standards-based reporting for the 2006-2007 school year, and the process began in kindergarten system-wide.

The following year, it was rolled up to first grade, then second grade. This fall, it will be used in every elementary school in kindergarten through third grade.

“Standards-based report cards give much more specific information as to how a student is performing in a particular area,” Goodwin said.

The report cards show how students are performing at the end of the grading period.

“In traditional grading, several grades over the course of the grading period are averaged together, so it is difficult for a parent to really know whether or not their child made progress over time,” Goodwin said. “With standards-based reporting, the teacher looks at patterns of progress over the entire grading period, and the grade reflects whether or not the learning has been mastered at the end of the grading period.”

Goodwin said teachers tell her the new cards are more time-consuming to fill out, but they also help them better pinpoint areas in which individual students need help.

School system spokesman Eric Beavers said officials will review the report cards at the end of the school year to decide whether to implement the system in fourth grade or higher.

“The Georgia Department of Education requires schools to establish 70 as the minimum passing score in grades four and up,” Beavers said. “The state board granted a waiver allowing Whitfield County Schools to use standards-based report cards up to fifth grade. Next year, all elementary schools will be using standards-based report cards in kindergarten through third grade. At the end of the year, school and district leaders will review the report cards and see what to do next.”

Beavers said parents learn about the system through open house nights, newsletters, parent conferences and other schools. Parents will have a good idea of whether their child has passing grades by looking at the report card, he said. A committee made up of the student’s teachers, parents and sometimes other administrators determines whether the child advances to the next grade.

State education department spokesman Dana Tofig said several school districts in Georgia, including Spalding and Jackson counties, have received permission to use standards-based report cards. Kindergarten uses the system statewide.

“Districts are generally using it so they can move away from the letter and number grade to move to something on how students are mastering specific standards,” Tofig said.