Montgomery County pupils have new report-card goal: Straight ES’s

Say goodbye to the “A for effort” and hello to the “DEM.”

Your kid not doing so hot in math? Don’t count on seeing a C or D. Look for an N instead.

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The Montgomery County public school system is joining other districts across the country in abandoning traditional letter grades for some students and instead matching student evaluations with specific curriculum standards.

Instead of seeing A’s, B’s, C’s or D’s on report cards this November, for the first time, parents of Montgomery students in third grade will see ES, P, I or N. Those new letters will also apply to students in first through second grade, who used to get O’s, S’s or N’s.

Teachers also will mark students separately on learning skills such as “effort,” “intellectual risk taking” and “originality” with separate codes of DEM (demonstrating), PRG (progressing) or N (not yet evident).

Although the first report cards under the “standards-based” grading system aren’t due for about a month, the dramatic shift is worrying parents in the high-achieving school district who are concerned that their children can’t earn straight A’s or land on the traditional honor roll. Parents also are confused about how to use the information from the new report cards to help their kids do better in school.

District officials say the switch, which will eventually also apply to fourth- and fifth-graders, will give parents more details about their children’s academic performance and provide more rigorous standards for what being “proficient” in a subject area means.

“It’s a huge paradigm shift,” said Ebony Langford-Brown, director of elementary instruction and achievement.

After being piloted at 25 schools in the past five years, the new report cards will be used at all 132 elementary schools in the district this fall. Officials adopted the standards-based report card to match the county’s new curriculum guidelines for elementary schools, called Curriculum 2.0.

In the old system, students received a single letter grade in a subject area, such as math, social studies or reading. On the standards-based report card, each subject area is broken down into several categories. For example, social studies is divided into “measurement topics” of civics, culture, economics, geography and history.

Teachers mark students with an ES, P, I or N in each category to indicate how close students are to mastering what they should know by the end of the school year. ES means “exceptional,” P means “demonstrating proficiency,” I means “in progress,” and N means “not yet making progress or making minimal progress” toward meeting standards.

Parents of kindergartners will still see P, I and N, but won’t get the new, more detailed report cards until December.

Langford-Brown said the switch is aimed at offering a more accurate assessment of how well students understand concepts. There isn’t a one-to-one comparison between the traditional letter-grade system and the new report card, she added — an ES isn’t the same as an A, a P isn’t a B.

For example, a student who gets a question wrong on a 10-question test would get an A under a traditional grading standard. But the question the student got wrong may be measuring a more complex application of a skill, rather than simply asking students to recall a fact. If a student can’t apply what they’ve learned, they might receive a P, not an ES.