St. Charles School Board Members Question New Grading System

Several members of the raised questions about the district's move to standards based grading during a work session with district principals Thursday. 

Students in grades 1-8 will no longer receive a grade of A through F this year on their report cards. Instead, the students will be evaluated using standards based grading, which gives them a grade of 1-4 on specific skills in each subject. 

The district introduced standards based grading several years ago and is moving toward using it in all grades by the 2015-2016 school year.  

Is Standards Based Grading Working? 

School Board President Linda Schulte said the switch to standards based grading has been an enormous undertaking in teacher time and training. She said she senses a lot of uncertainty from teachers how they assess certain standards and give grades. 

"I would hope the goal of standards based grading is to help us assess our students and use that to drive instruction," she said. "My question is, how would we know it’s working?" 

Board member Sheri Bickmeyer said as a district parent she has thus far not found the new grading system helpful, although she can see the value in the switch in assessing students. 

"My old report cards told me are my kids getting what’s being taught? Are they completing the work successfully, and how they are doing on tests?" she said. "The (new) report card, it has all these numbers, I'm missing the (teacher-written) blurbs. The blurbs are what spoke to me as a parent."

District Will Improve in Time

Superintendent Jeff Marion said the district teachers need support of the board to fully implement standards based grading. 

He said there have been too many students who have had grades artificially inflated or deflated for their average. 

"The fact that we're not perfect at it — I don't want us to judge standards based grading and what we can do long term based on that," he said. "I've got 200 years worth of evidence that what we're doing now isn't working."

Principal Jeff Walker told the board that he's seeing a disconnect between the letter grades students earn in class and how those students perform on state tests. 

"We ran some data last year to this year's EOC (End of Course state test) results and pulled out the ABCDF letter grades," he said. "Your letter grade should match up with what we see on state tests. What we found out is, it's not matching up." 

Standards based grading establishes a standard for what a student should know in each grade and teachers evaluate them on each of those standards. 

Annette Hill, principal of , said while the district isn't great at standards based grading yet, they are improving each year. 

"I can tell you in the past you might have had three different boys in third grade and might have been learning completely different units, completely different skills and they all got an A," Hill said. "Even in the past, the grades weren’t equivalent. Now, it’s giving everyone the same objectives."

Parents, what questions do you have about standards based grading? We'll ask the district to answer any questions submitted in the comments below.