I am the parent of three school-aged children, the husband of a teacher, a long-time DPAC Representative and am the former PAC President in a school that piloted the new grading and report card system in the Langley School District. In this blog post I want to share my thoughts on why I feel BC’s new reporting policy for K-12 students is not a good fit for our students.

Let’s start with a simple truth. I don’t want to be out here fighting the new reporting system. As a PAC we really want to be fighting about class size and composition. Our school was built in the 1990’s to handle 200 students with a maximum capacity for 250. It is now stuffed with 450. When I first volunteered with the PAC the location of my daughter’s classroom was a playground and tetherball court. Now it is home to multiple portables. But that battle has already been lost, they won’t be building us any new schools anytime soon. So I am out here fighting a battle that can still be won.

Our school of 450 is packed full, every teacher has a full class, and most are in remedy. Remedy is a term used when a teacher has more students in their class than is allowed under the School Act and their professional contract. We are talking about 30 students in a Grade 5 classroom, and that is not 30 easy to teach students, that is 25 typical students and at least 4-5 who have special needs and, by right, deserve significant Special Education Assistant (SEA) support. These are students who are not learning at grade level and have Independent Education Plans (IEPs).

In a traditional classroom there would be 1-2 SEAs supporting the students with IEPs and allowing the classroom teacher the time to give individual help to the average, quiet kids to ensure they didn’t fall behind. But those days are no more and instead we have massively overworked teachers in incredibly busy classrooms without enough SEA support. So who gets the short straw in this scenario? The quiet kids struggling to learn in a crowded system that has little time to give them the individual attention and support they deserve.

What does this have to do with grading? Well, the old grading system gave parents a tool to find out how their children were doing in a clear and semi-objective manner and now that tool is being taken away from us. These new reports provide little to no useful detail about our child’s holistic learning experience while making it harder to know how our children are doing in the larger sense.

Let’s start with a quick explanation of the new system without the bureaucratic gobbledygook. The system has four tiers Emerging, Developing, Proficient and Extending.

Emerging is the term reserved for students who are below grade level (say with IEPs) or who aren’t in a position for grade-level reporting.

Developing is the term for students who are just learning a topic but haven’t achieved proficiency. They don’t get the material yet. There are lots of reasons to be a Developing student and teachers will concentrate their limited time on their Developing students because they need the most help.

Extending is the term used for the high-flyers. These are the students who don’t just understand the material but know it well enough to help out their peers. Extending students do well wherever they go and aren’t a concern to this discussion.

All the rest of the students are in that mushy middle called Proficient. The Proficient scale has no gradation. Under the old system Proficient would encompass everything from a bare pass (C+) to near mastery (A). If your child is Proficient you have no clue if your child is barely getting by or is in the top of their class.

To clarify something that may not be clear, even the high-flyers aren’t graded as Extending in the middle of the session and when first introduced to a topic most students will be Developing with most migrating quickly to basic proficiency and a small minority achieving Extending towards the end of their study. Ultimately most students will be Proficient for most of the year. Your child is barely hanging in there: Proficient, your child is acing every test: still Proficient.

The historical letter grade scale provides a pretty blunt gradation scale typically A, B, C and F or 4 general levels of gradation. As kids got older the gradation increased with the addition of +/- resulting in a scale from A+ to C with 8 intervals. (A+, A, A-, B+ ,B, B-, C+, C). That level of gradation allowed teachers to report on subtle changes in performance where a C+ to a B- was a minor improvement while going from an A to a C+ was a huge drop. This ability to provide detail through gradation is eliminated in the new approach. 80% of the kids are in the same box with both C+ and A being Proficient.

As an analogy, if this were a fuel gauge in your car the three lines would read Full, Flashing Empty and Gas.  Now what family would trust a fuel gauge that only said “gas” before they went over the Coquihalla? Does “gas” mean I have enough fuel for a quick trip or am I going to run out while on my way to Grandmas?

The reality is parents want to know not only if their kids are Proficient they want to know in what direction those kids are moving academically, and the new system is not designed to collect nor relay that information to them in a consistent manner.

To give an example, imagine you have a child who was a strong reader in Grade 3 but due to other interests (sports, art etc..) didn’t concentrate enough on reading in Grades 4-7. A gradual decline in reading scores would be noted in a system with a reasonably grainy reporting format and would be missed in the new one.

A slow, gradual drop from A to C+ is all Proficient under the new reporting system. Such a drop can occur slowly over years so wouldn’t necessarily be noticed by individual teachers who only saw your child for one year. The child would be slowly getting further and further behind without anyone who could make a difference even recognizing it was happening. This is our biggest fear and the one none of the documentation provided by the Ministry addresses.

Additionally we have to look at the policy from the perspective of older students. We need to start with the recognition that the rest of the world still relies on letter grades/percentages in establishing student achievement. Universities and colleges still define entry standards based on grading and as such British Columbian students have to be prepared to operate in a world where they will be graded and their future opportunities will be restricted by the grades they achieve in high school.

Achieving high grades is not something that comes naturally to all who try. It takes learning how to deal with the pressures of trying and failing, learning where you are weak and where you need to work harder and learning how to achieve top grades in testing environments. Students who spend the entirety of their academic career in a world where all you need to be is “Proficient” do not build those skills/capabilities. To then arrive at Grade 10 and be told that you now need all these skills because your Grade 10 and 11 marks count is simply not fair to these students.

As an analogy, we don’t drop young athletes into championship competition without first training them and letting them learn how to compete and win in lower leagues with lower stakes and lower challenges. But our school system is doing just that. From Kindergarten until Grade 9 our students are being told that all that matters is they are Proficient and suddenly in Grade 10 they are being told that excellence matters. But they have no clue where they stand in the larger competition because they have never had the chance to find out.

Students who are “Proficient” at the C+ level literally don’t know that they are at the C+ level. They have always been told they are at the same level as their peers and the reporting supported those false beliefs. Suddenly in Grade 10 they get to find out that is not the case and it is often too late to address the challenge.

One critical skill our schooling system has failed to teach our kids is resilience and this decision to protect our children from the possibility of failure is not teaching them resilience. Children need the opportunity to try and fail then try again until they learn to succeed.

To conclude, as a parent I am not wedded to letter grades, I am not fighting to support anyone’s claim to having an honor student. What I want is a reporting system that supplies sufficiently grainy results so we can determine whether our kids are meeting their potential and when they don’t to tell us so we can give them more help. Unfortunately, the new approach being used in BC doesn’t do that. Instead it takes 80% of the students and drops them in one big black box called Proficient which leaves parents with insufficient information as we fight to get our kids the best education possible in a system under intense stress.