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Shelli Pence, a first-grade teacher at Southeast Elementary School in Marion, said she likes the new, detailed report card Marion Community Schools will begin using this fall.
She said it gives teachers and parents an idea of the specific areas on which a student needs to work.

Yes, the detailed report IS nice. We get it after every ISTEP. What's the point of giving it every 9 weeks, when there is no way to assess all 150 (aprx) standards in that time period? The first report card of any year will be 3/4 blank, since those standards haven't even been addressed yet.

What is it about A-F that fails to communicate which areas children need to work on? Why the need for a numeric system for the more detailed report cards?

Finally, if getting this detailed, standards-specific report every year is not frequent enough, why is there any reason to think that every quarter will be sufficient?

I our school district (SWAC in Fort Wayne) the early grades of K-2 use the 1,2,3 system and then are changed to the letter grade system for 3-12. Until my kids got to the third grade I never realy new how well thay mastered the actual material.

Telling a parent that their child has mastery over a subject is different than telling them they have other problems that are hampering their ability to learn that material.

We struggled for years with a child that we were told could do that work, but when he started to get letter grades that were not in line with the mastery chart we were perplexed to say the least.

After 6 years and a repeat of the first grade we finally found out he had a learning disability that required additional training and medication.

Nothing gets your attention like a D or an F on the old report card.

We did this in kindergarten. There was a report card every four weeks or so. When I got my first report card, I got an "F" in almost every category (it was pass/fail, or whatever, on about 100 "skills;" I don't remember the exact designations). My parents were furious, as I was the firstborn and they weren't familiar with the system yet.

It turns out that they used "FAIL" to mean either "fail" or "not evaluated." Of course this system didn't give parents more information; it gave them less information because they didn't know which skills a student could have passed. Apparently they did this because regulations prohibited blank lines and there was no place to state that the teacher hadn't covered that skill yet. Teachers obviously didn't want to face parents' fury when a "pass" turned to a "fail," so they just started everyone on "fail."