Standards Based Grade Cards

Why do we have Standard Based Grade Cards?

This has been a recommendation that the Ohio Department of Education has strongly suggested that we implement. When I came here in 2008, our 3-8 school was in School Improvement Year 8. The first meeting I attended was in Toledo and the only other schools there were Toledo Public Schools and Fostoria City Schools. This should fill you in on how serious this problem was. They gave me a packet of initiatives that needed to be implemented along with 2 ODE consultants that were going to come out every month until we fixed the problem.  We ultimately did fix the problem in 2009 after my first year here.

The rationale behind standards based grade cards is that teachers need to fully understand what concepts students have mastered and not mastered and communicate this with parents so that parents know what their students need help with.  When a student is given an arbitrary letter grade, it’s difficult to know what they did well and didn’t do well.