Why is reading a report card 4X a year such a drain on your head space?

My experience is that they are a vehicle to alert parents when there’s a problem. If you’re getting the boilerplate, your kid is either doing fine or at least keep out of trouble. That’s probably the most you can glean from it. We had a kid with learning disabilities that we first caught onto because of issues flagged by the teacher on a report card. With my other kid, it’s how we learned he hadn’t been doing any of the assigned work. I rarely saw comments reflecting a nuanced understanding of my kids’ performance. Only alarm bells or boilerplate - little in between. I came to accept that no news was good news.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My son’s teachers have always provided a paragraph or more of comments, not all copied/pasted either. This is in APS, one standards based school, one not.

I'm a twin PP above; the paragraph is clearly "fill in the blank" from my perspective. Somewhat informational, but less so when you realize it's mostly written for them.

My kids’ teachers (Ashlawn) have always written very personalized, substantive remarks.

Anonymous wrote:Huh? ES Teacher here. Lots of kids are not getting all 4's/A's (whever your school uses) and lots of kids also have behavioral issues and/or other classroom issues.

Its great that your student is excelling but not all students are and their parents definitely need to know!

From what I've seen, students who are even two grade levels above in a subject (going by standardized test scores) are still given 3's. It seems a lot of teachers simply won't give out 4's.

At least the report cards have started having some standardized test scores. All the other numbers seem to be "whatever the teacher feels like."

Anonymous wrote:My son’s teachers have always provided a paragraph or more of comments, not all copied/pasted either. This is in APS, one standards based school, one not.

I'm a twin PP above; the paragraph is clearly "fill in the blank" from my perspective. Somewhat informational, but less so when you realize it's mostly written for them.

Anonymous wrote:I have twins so it is easy for me to see that teachers write the exact same narrative comments for everyone (and my kids are pretty different!).

+1. It's clearly a Mad Lib situation.

Anonymous wrote:Report cards are legal documents that follow a kid throughout school. They shouldn’t be telling parents anything they don’t already know, especially in elementary school. If your kid is struggling, you will already know and if you child is above average, you’ve already been notified.

Unless you have them expunged. Yup. Elementary school is daycare

Anonymous wrote:But even if they give fewer report cards, they won’t give extra instruction days so….

Exactly, the school year would just end a few days earlier.

Sorry it cannot be straight babysitting. There is a report to go along with the time spent.

Anonymous wrote:I stopped looking the standards based report card after the first one (a couple years ago). I feel bad that the teachers have to work on them but they tell me nothing useful. If you're an APS parent, you can let APS know what they think in a new survey they just released:
http://track.spe.schoolmessenger.com/f/a/6F62V43JomYG7Y9GVSPr5g~~/AAAAAQA~/RgRj_5tVP0QmaHR0cHM6Ly9zdXJ2ZXkuazEyaW5zaWdodC5jb20vci8zNFdSWGZXB3NjaG9vbG1CCmId1WceYg_5Z99SE0plbm5uZXZpbkB5YWhvby5jb21YBAAAAAE~

edit: what *you think

I stopped looking the standards based report card after the first one (a couple years ago). I feel bad that the teachers have to work on them but they tell me nothing useful. If you're an APS parent, you can let APS know what they think in a new survey they just released:
http://track.spe.schoolmessenger.com/f/a/6F62V43JomYG7Y9GVSPr5g~~/AAAAAQA~/RgRj_5tVP0QmaHR0cHM6Ly9zdXJ2ZXkuazEyaW5zaWdodC5jb20vci8zNFdSWGZXB3NjaG9vbG1CCmId1WceYg_5Z99SE0plbm5uZXZpbkB5YWhvby5jb21YBAAAAAE~

My son’s teachers have always provided a paragraph or more of comments, not all copied/pasted either. This is in APS, one standards based school, one not.

But even if they give fewer report cards, they won’t give extra instruction days so….

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This quarter DDs report card was even more useless than ever -- literally one line from her homeroom teacher saying she's on track. The other teachers didn't include any personal info at all. Why bother? I'd rather skip the teacher planning day and have them in school instead.

Agree! More teaching, less performative work.

This is how teachers feel too!

Anonymous wrote:This quarter DDs report card was even more useless than ever -- literally one line from her homeroom teacher saying she's on track. The other teachers didn't include any personal info at all. Why bother? I'd rather skip the teacher planning day and have them in school instead.

OP here and this is exactly my feeling. Okay, you feel the need to have a record somewhere fo all kids. But you don't need to do that more than 2x year (even that seems generous given what these actually look like). Cut the prep days and give my kids a couple more days of actual instruction - that'll go a lot further than this useless piece of paper.