Dear Parents and Guardians,

Our first marking period ended on November 5th and report cards were sent out via email during the week of November 15th. We send report cards to the email addresses that we have on file in our school database. If you did not receive a copy of your child’s report card, please first check your “spam” folder to make sure that your ISP didn’t flag the bulk message. If it isn’t there, please send an email to BHS Tech Support Specialist “Extraordinaire,” Bob Coate (rcoate@belmont.k12.ma.us). Bob will be glad to try to correct the issue and get a report card out to you ASAP.

Last month I wrote to you about the issue of student stress relative to the expectations that we all put on our students. The issuance of report cards is definitely one of those times when you can palpably feel the anxiety level rise in the school. I’m sure we all recall the butterflies in the pit of the our stomachs that we all felt in having to present that report card we carried home from school to our parents. While I’m sure that these feelings are quite possibly the same for our students today, the purpose and meaning of a report card has actually changed quite a bit over the last twenty years.

In 1993, the State Legislature passed the Massachusetts Education Reform Act (MERA). This law changed a lot about the way in which public schools are conducted. Probably the most recognizable change of the MERA was the implementation of the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) test, which all students in the state need to “pass” in order to receive a high school diploma. Along with the MCAS, the MERA also directed the Department of Education to develop Frameworks documents in the Arts, English Language Arts, Foreign Language, Comprehensive Health, Mathematics, History and Social Science, Science, Technology and Engineering, English Language Proficiency, and Vocational Technical Education. (To see copies of the current Frameworks Documents, click here.) The MCAS and the Frameworks are designed to work hand-in-hand. The Frameworks list the skills and knowledge, or Standards, that all students need to master and the MCAS actually measures the extent to which a student has mastered these standards. The identifying categories on the MCAS exam itself, “Advanced,” “Proficient,” “Needs Improvement” and “Failing” are all used to describe how well a student has mastered the Standards outlined in a particular Framework.

The practice of a standardized test measuring a student’s progress relative to an agreed-upon Standard is very different from what you and I experienced in school. The tests we took usually measured our progress relative to the other students who took the same test. This is why the MCAS doesn’t report student scores in terms of percentiles. It is not comparing one student to other students, but rather comparing a student to the Standard. While we were all accustomed to the bell curve-style distribution of student performance, where small numbers of students alternately do very well or very poorly with the rest somewhere in the middle, the Standards-based system holds as a fundamental assumption that all students, given the proper conditions, will be able to master the Standards.

Since passage of the MCAS became a state law in order to receive a diploma, and the Frameworks were the criteria that students were tested on, the Frameworks became the de facto mandated statewide curriculum, and the Standards-based philosophy became the basis for all public school systems of assessing student performance. Unfortunately, I don’t think this has not been broadcast effectively enough to parents, and the community at large. Grades simply do not mean the same thing that they did when we went to school. The Report Cards students received this week are meant to be a “snapshot” that records their progress in demonstrating proficiency relative to the standards that have been identified as essential for mastering a specific course, not a comparison of their performance to other students.

The change to Standards-based Grading has also caused two other vestiges of the old grading system, class rank, honor roll, grade point averages, to be much less relevant. Class rank is the literal rank-ordering, or comparison, of students based on their performance, and is antithetical to the Standards-based practice of measuring students relative to Standards. As a result, we discontinued this practice at BHS more than ten years ago. While we do still calculate grade point averages and list honor roll students, these “statistics” can no longer be considered a valid measure of performance as they were designed to compare students. Here are two pieces of data that bear this out. The median grade earned by students in the first quarter of this year is “A-,” and over 75% of the school made the honor roll for this quarter. These pieces of data also mirror our schools results on the MCAS test, which show a skew towards the “Advanced-Proficient” end of the rating scale. Given that our curriculum is aligned with the Frameworks and that our students do well on the MCAS exam, we should expect them to be doing well in their classes at BHS.

I think it’s important for all of us to pause for a moment and realize that grades are not meant to be a method for comparing students, but rather are a means of feedback for teachers, students and parents to measuring student progress towards meeting a standard. They are not a punishment, nor are they somehow indicative of some personal flaw in the student. As I think back to those day in my childhood when I handed over my report card to my father, I remember that after looking it over, he always asked me, “Did you do your best?” Most of the time, I could look him in the eye and answer, “yes” and he would respond, “That’s all I can ask.” I guess that is what hasn’t changed about report cards. All we can ask of students is for them to give their best, and we should be satisfied if they can confidently answer that they have.

Have a great Thanksgiving,

Sincerely,

Michael M. Harvey, Ed.D
Principal