Anonymous wrote:The Ps grading system is only one part of MCPS's avoidance of transparency.
Consider:
Around the time my college student started K, MCPS was revising their grading system. If a student attempted homework, they would receive a minimum of 50%. If a student did poorly on a test they could be reassessed. Extra credit would no longer be given, but if a student attempted an assignment, the minimum grade they could get on it (if it was graded) was 50%. Most homework was not graded, but merely checked for completion.
In practice, tests in elementary never came home. They were county-wide assessments and sending them home would compromise their security. Instead parents got summary reports with information stating the student's scores for both on-grade level and above grade level items. Each score would have three ranges denoting whether the scores demonstrated complee understanding, developing understanding, or minimal understanding. There was no way for the parents to see which questions had been missed or why they had been missed. The kids did review the tests in class, but then they had to return them rather than being able to keep them for future reference.
Meanwhile, for writing assignments, I was informed by a curriculum developer that teachers were only supposed to correct a selection of errors, focusing on a specific subsection. For example, this paper the teacher might correct capitalization, another paper they might correct punctuation. It was thought that correcting all errors would be too demoralizing.
Report cards for K-2 used (O)utstanding, (S)atisfactory, and (N)eeds Improvement. Grades 3-5 had letter grades (A-E), but the really informative part were the Teacher Comments included with the report cards.
In 2012, the elementary report card was changed. Gone were letter grades and teacher comments. Ps covered a wide range of achievement ranging from mastery to barely passing. It was apparently unclear what level of performance merited the top grade E, with reports that in some schools it was extremely rare.
When Algebra final exam failure rates became so high it created a controversy, they decided the answer was to eliminate finals.
Here's a reference to the crisis in Forbes. Bad press for "one of the best school systems in the nation".
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2014/06/30/an-82-percent-failure-rate-on-high-school-algebra-exams/amp/
If MCPS is returning to letter grades for elementary report cards I applaud them for moving in the right direction. I would argue, however, that it is only the first step in a long road needed to give students and parents an accurate accounting of a student's performance.
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