Bellingham Adopts Standards Based Reporting

Bellingham middle school students won’t be seeing As on their report cards this year. Instead, 4, 3, 2, and 1 will speckle the paper report cards mailed home Feb. 12.

Bellingham School District is joining a steady wave of schools that are moving from a traditional grading scale of A, B, C, D and F to a standards-based reporting system, which uses a scale of 1 to 4. According to the district website, 4 means exceeding expectations, 3 means meeting expectations, 2 means approaching expectations and 1 means well below expectations.

While elementary schools have already been grading students on a 1 to 4 scale, it was implemented in middle schools last fall. This report card is the first of the school year to sport numerical marks.

“The driver behind it is that we believe, and the research helps support, that the standard state system results in higher performance of students meaning the academic standards that we have set for them,” said Trina Hall, Bellingham School District program administrator.

School districts such as Spokane, Snohomish and Kent already use standards-based reporting. In 2011, Washington state became one of 45 states to adopt Common Core State Standards. These nationally based standards, developed by the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices, define the skills and knowledge that particular grade levels should have in the areas of English language arts and mathematics.

“The idea behind that is to have, across the nation, similar expectations for students,” Hall said. “A key piece is that it separates the reporting of academic performance from the learning or success attributes – behaviors that support learning like effort, participation, attending to detail, being on-task, task completion. In a traditional grading system, they’re all mixed together.”

Where the old system averaged scores, this separate scoring of behavior and understanding puts the emphasis on learning and allows students to better understand their responsibilities.

"If a kid wants to raise their grade it's not just a conversation about looking through missing work and all the things that may be distractors. Instead, the conversation is, 'Great, let's look at how proficient you are towards all the math concepts you're supposed to know.' I can then point out, 'It looks like you did pretty well here. On the other hand, this skill here, I haven't seen that you're able to do it yet. Let's get you better at this skill," said Bryan Berreth, a 7th grade math teacher at Kulshan Middle School.

Along with many other teachers, Berreth has been implementing standards-based reporting techniques in his classroom for more than five years.

"In the past couple of years because of standards-based practices I started minimizing homework completion and participation from students' grades. The change resulted because I wanted my As, Bs, Cs and Ds to be reflective, as much as possible, of their math understanding,” said Berreth. 

Assessments of understanding put students in a growth mindset, said Berreth.

“The questions the kids ask me are more consistently now about, ‘How do I get better at this?’ As opposed to, ‘How do I get my grade up?’” said Berreth.

The school district began planning for the change in December of 2011 with the intent of implementing standards-based reporting in the 2012-2013 school year. The district used Kentucky’s statewide standards-based reporting system as a model. With the launch of a new online platform this year, called Skyward, the grading change was a natural step.

“Teachers have been teaching in a standards-based curriculum for a long time, but they haven’t had the capability to communicate their scoring mechanisms with students and their families with standards-based reporting format,” said Rachel Williams, co-chair of the Parent Advisory Council to the Superintendent.

The grading scale transition has been a regular topic of discussion at the monthly committee meetings. The group acts as liaison between parents and Superintendent Greg Baker, voicing parent concerns and helping parents understand changes.

Through Skyward teachers generate report cards and record grades and comments.

“One of the great pieces about that is that at the middle school and high school we have family access, so the families can log in and see the teachers’ gradebook,” Hall said. “So they can see what assignments are coming up, what assignments might be late or missing and they just have more information about how to support their child at home.”

For Williams, this tool improves communication and helps her support her son’s long-term learning.

“He might do really well, but if he’s still not being really tidy or he’s late about getting things in, that’s going to matter more and more as he gets older,” said Williams of her son who attends Fairhaven Middle School. “I like that they keep those things separate. If you have a kid that’s really struggling, you might be able to find that they have something that they excel at that you didn’t know before because they can get a really high score in one thing that would have been really diluted if it was mixed into one score.”

However, change can be difficult. The school district and teachers don’t expect the transition to be without growing pains.  

"I think one of the challenges is that a lot of families, a lot of teachers, and a lot of students have had quite a bit of success with the old system. Based on that, they may wonder, 'Why change?' It's a reasonable question. At the same time, those students will still be successful under the new system. My belief is the more specific feedback and information can encourage an even greater number of students to be successful,” Berreth said.  

In addition to a grading guide that accompanied report cards, the district has been making efforts to help parents and students understand the change. Each elementary and middle school hosted information nights in the fall to provide parents with information about how the change would affect their children, said Hall. More information is available on the district and school websites. 

Surveys will be conducted next week to gauge how families feel about the report cards, said Hall.

“We’re following that up with a survey to parents, some students and staff next week to get information on, ‘Were they easy to understand? Was there anything confusing?’ You know, kind of just how the information is being received at home,” said Hall.

Teachers and principles representing different schools and grade levels will work in Steering Committees to evaluate the system’s success by gathering information and solving problems to help the school districts make improvements, said Hall, who oversees the committees. The group will look at the data and surveys and gather information from their schools to evaluate what support or communication is needed.

“The ideas around this change are based in research and best practice, they’re not just a whim,” said Hall. “As we work together in our teaching team, it will take time. To do really good work takes time.”

For some students, the switch may be easy.

“That’s been the fun part. Students seem to just get it,” said Hall. “At the curriculum nights and some of the open houses that I attended I’ve notice that the students and the teachers – it makes sense to them. The students have a good grasp on what the different scores mean and what they need to do to earn those scores to show their performance. I think that’s been one of the nice surprises. I think some of the people that can explain the program the best are the students.”

Through the transition, the district’s priority is ensuring that families, students and staff feel supported and ask for more information as it is needed, said Hall.

“The whole idea behind the report card is that it’s not just a report card, it’s a reporting system where we have ongoing, different ways of communicating with families about their child’s progress in school,” said Hall. “It’s just really a support for good, high quality classroom instruction.”