Reply to do most kids get all As in elementary school?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Coming from another school district I don't understand this question.

I've never looked at my kid's "grades" in elementary that closely unless they were low. They used a 4-point scale and 3 meant on target and 4 meant exceeding target. Usually my kid would get mostly 3s at the beginning of the year and mostly 4s at the end of the year. This was probably fairly accurate (as a PP noted elementary school is not hard for a kid with educated and supportive parents) but it's not what I would focus on. Especially since a lot of the grades were for stuff like art and PE -- no one's kid is failing those subjects in elementary school unless they are super disruptive or not participating at all. The point of those parts of elementary is simply to participate.

[b]Instead I'd focus on objective assessments like DIBELs for reading or iReady for math [/b]and look at where my kid was landing within the bands for her grade as well as how she was progressing across trimesters and grades. This gave me a much better sense of how she was doing on core subjects and whether we needed to offer more support or supplement.

So "grade inflation" in elementary sounds like a dumb concept to me. Teachers will absolutely flag a kid who is behind via grades but the focus should be a lot more precise than that. Are they getting a 2 in ELA because they are struggling with reading or writing. Is the issue decoding or comprehension. Is there a developmental issue like fine motor skills impacting their writing. Do they have signs of a learning disorder. And so one. Elementary school is fundamentally different from middle or high school and grades operate in a different way. Talking about "grade inflation" when you are getting a report card that provides scores on assessment tests and learning disorder screenings is weird. Grow up.[/quote]

+1 to the bolded. If you're looking for information on how your kid is doing, we live in a golden age. Grades are less useful than the other measures.

Our third grade got all As last year, all Ps the two years before that. She finally got a B on this most recent interim, but her grades are suddenly all over the place, like her B was in a subject where she got an A on one standard and a D on the other, based on only two grades. We're trying to figure out what's going on there (her teacher hasn't explained it to us yet and the work hasn't come home), but I also find that B based on two pieces of classwork a lot less helpful than looking at her MAP scores.[/quote]

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