Elementary report card useless?

[Anonymous]

At least you get report cards. It’s February and I’ve gotten nothing for my 5th grader all year.

- charter school parent.

[Anonymous]

So very useless. If your PK kid begins the year knowing how to count to 50 and sound out simple words, the first report card will pick the boilerplate language option from the dropdown menu that says they "meet expectations" because...they can "count to 5" and identify "some" letters of the alphabet. At the end of the year, the dropdown option will say they can now count to 50 and sound out simple words. Magic! All-important growth metric achieved! Teacher performance criteria met! Huzzah DCPS!

(No, it's not a hypothetical example. Apparently, per DCUM commenter reaction in the past, it's probably just one teacher at one school who games the report card/assessment system this way, despite the obvious systemic motivation to do so. Just mentioning again now because: I know it's a thing that can and has happened, because it happened to us. And these report cards - with their simple dropdown categories and lack of individual language - are your glimpse into a core tracking element of the system that incentivizes it.)