I found the report profoundly useless in helping me assess how my children are doing and what we need to work on.

Me too! We are supposed to get even less feedback under this new system.

The Secretary of Education has made it perfectly clear that parents are not a welcome partner in the education of our children. His position is adversarial to oversight or agreement.

Odd because I thought as taxpayers and parents I thought we would have some insight into what was actually taught and receive some meaningful feedback.

Anonymous wrote:
Yes, it did. O/S/I correlated to the graded assignments and unit tests in reading, math, writing and other subjects. If your child received an I or S, the teacher could clearly show the work that led had deficiencies. The boundary between S/O was good for kids in the middle or upper middle who were not struggling but not performing as well as they could. It was clear what kids getting an S needed to do to earn an O and this produced better work for those kids. It also gave kids pride that they went from S to O. It sent the message that practice and working hard can lead to achievement.

That was not my experience.

Anonymous wrote:MCPS has a strong anti-achievement perspective. Its about MCPS doing well not students actually learning anything or students achieving the best they can do.

This is not my experience either.

Would an O/S/I in Reading -- just Reading, no subcategories, no anything else -- have been more helpful? That's what the previous report card had.

Yes, it did. O/S/I correlated to the graded assignments and unit tests in reading, math, writing and other subjects. If your child received an I or S, the teacher could clearly show the work that led had deficiencies. The boundary between S/O was good for kids in the middle or upper middle who were not struggling but not performing as well as they could. It was clear what kids getting an S needed to do to earn an O and this produced better work for those kids. It also gave kids pride that they went from S to O. It sent the message that practice and working hard can lead to achievement.

The new system is basically P and I. You have a conflation of the measurement scale. Work that would have been an S in the past, is now a P. Better schools have teachers that send home lots of comments on work and share with parents off-line whether their child is earning what they consider a "low P" pr a "high P". Other schools or teachers are sending home hardly any graded assignments, sending an occasional P and not able to produce anything in the conferences.

MCPS has a strong anti-achievement perspective. Its about MCPS doing well not students actually learning anything or students achieving the best they can do.

Anonymous wrote:I found the report profoundly useless in helping me assess how my children are doing and what we need to work on.

I assume this system works for the teachers, since it sure as hell doesn't work for the parents.

Would an O/S/I in Reading -- just Reading, no subcategories, no anything else -- have been more helpful? That's what the previous report card had.

I found the report profoundly useless in helping me assess how my children are doing and what we need to work on.

I assume this system works for the teachers, since it sure as hell doesn't work for the parents.

Anonymous wrote:I think we need to go old school... you perform about grade level benchmark you get a higher grade.

The P with no possibility of ES is a ceiling in the middle. Eventually kids hit their heads against it enough they will stop trying to excel. Just good enough, is good enough.

And if being above grade level means you get a good grade, then hard-working kids who are below grade level will stop trying to work hard, because they won't get a good grade anyway. And above-grade level kids will realize that you don't need to work hard to get a good grade. That's how it worked in my old-school days.

I think we need to go old school... you perform about grade level benchmark you get a higher grade.

The P with no possibility of ES is a ceiling in the middle. Eventually kids hit their heads against it enough they will stop trying to excel. Just good enough, is good enough.

My kids care more about the reading group/math group they are in than their grades.

That is interesting the disparity. At our school yes we are told the same. There is no way to get an ES in math. We do have unit assessments but 100% correct = P. Including extra more challenging problems seems like a fair way to give ESes to me, I often wondered why our school does not do this.

I have a third grader and he loves math despite the fact he can't get the "best" grade. He's more worried about getting all the problems right versus the grade. I could see how in a year or two he might catch on that he could get by with less effort, so that its a great observation by someone with older kids.

At our school in second grade both the teacher and the principal have said there is no opportunity to get an ES math. I quote "ES is not available in every subject. For example, in math, a child can not earn an ES" in public meetings. In second grade at our school, the kids never get a challenge or ES question at the bottom of worksheets. They also don't get math tests.

Wow!!! Thanks for sharing, this just shows how uneven this supposed system of standards really is.

Don't you think if you have a kid that is really good in Math it would be a real boost to their self confidence to be able to score an ES in a subject they really liked. Instead we just set the bar to the middle then place a ceiling on the middle.

DS is in 2nd grade and got 2 ES on his report card. One for writing opinion and one for math. He also got an I for some writing and for something else. I was told that ES questions are at the bottom of every test worksheet. If a child gets them right (this is for math) on all tests he would get an ES.

Wow, this sounds fair and great. At our school in second grade both the teacher and the principal have said there is no opportunity to get an ES math. I quote "ES is not available in every subject. For example, in math, a child can not earn an ES" in public meetings. In second grade at our school, the kids never get a challenge or ES question at the bottom of worksheets. They also don't get math tests. The teacher prefer to observe how they do math problems in class playing a game or doing something with manipulative resources. We're been told that Curriculum 2.0 did away with unit tests so there is no longer any written documentation of what the child was scored doing beyond a teacher's notes. You can ask a teacher to share her observations but you don't have access to these notations.

DS has told me that if you finish math work early, which most kids do, he is instructed to work on his reading or writing assignments independently.

Anonymous wrote:I like the middle school Edline on-line system much better. it is transparent and list all test/homework scores, up coming project/test/HW. current average score update daily.

I wish they have something like this is ES.
So ES parents, hang in there, your child will get to middle school some day.

I think that this is the first time, ever, in any context, that I have heard/read somebody say that things will be better in middle school.

Anonymous wrote:

My 4th grader is at an HGC. His teacher said at Back to School night that for a student to get an ES, they need to do work that is at the ES level for a 6th grader.

This doesn't support the guidelines state that ES is only given for exceptional work at grade level. Our principal has stated that MCPS will not accelerate and will not give ES to students who simply demonstrate that they above grade level on their own. The argument on why ES is never given in math is that demonstrating anything beyond what is on the worksheet is above grade level and doesn't count. MCPS is passel of fools.

Teacher thinks that at an HGC they must be perforimng exceptional work at a 6th grade level.

I like the middle school Edline on-line system much better. it is transparent and list all test/homework scores, up coming project/test/HW. current average score update daily.

I wish they have something like this is ES.
So ES parents, hang in there, your child will get to middle school some day.

I think what we are all seeing as we share these stories is that there is not a coherent system for grading... It's been explained to me differently by the principal and teachers and differs from the two MCPS schools my children attend.

What you are seeing is for all the talk of "standards" the same problem that has been inherent in all grading, it varies from classroom to classroom based on the teacher.

The only thing new about ESPIN is that teachers are told to withhold the ES or make them impossible to get.