By Del Stover
12/14/04 — Not so long ago, the parents of kindergarten students could expect to receive a very simple report card informing them if little Johnny or Susie “plays well with others.”
No more. Kindergarten is not immune to today’s standards movement, and even the youngest tykes nowadays are expected to meet a minimum level of academics. Report cards increasingly reflect this reality with a more detailed accounting of a child’s progress.
Parents in Boston will soon discover this. This month, the city’s approximately 4,000 kindergartners will bring home a new report card that grades them on 19 different standards, including whether they can “collect, record, and represent data.”
“The intent is to measure specific tasks that we think kids at that age level should learn, so it’s not all milk and cookies anymore,” Michael Contompasis, the district’s chief operating officer, told the Boston Herald recently.
Also jumping on this bandwagon is the Visalia (Calif.) Unified School District, which has introduced new report cards that are “standards-based,” says K-6 Curriculum Coordinator Linda Bastrire
“California has state standards for kindergarten, and we are held accountable,” she says. “So we have a standards-based report card . . . it’s a documentation of everything that needs to be covered.”
That documentation isn’t so important for school records — teachers always have kept de-tailed notes on students, say educators across the nation. But as the standards movement has increased pressure on schools to boost student achievement, educators are attempting to give parents a better understanding of how children are faring with these standards.
That’s happening, in fact, at all grade levels — where most of the academic rigor is being seen — and kindergarten report cards are being carried along with the trend, they say.
That’s what happened in Bridgeport, Conn., where school officials recently revamped their elementary school report cards.
They provide parents with a more detailed listing of key state standards — and how well their children are doing on a set of academic subskills that indicate progress on meeting the standards.
For example, in addition to receiving a Good, Satisfactory, or Needs Improvement in the general category of mathematics, there is a checklist with such kindergarten skills as “arranges objects in order of size” or “recognizes number words 0-10.”
That’s information parents want to have — and it improves the educational partnership between parents and teachers, says Barbara Rogo, the district’s director of evaluation and research.
“If you say a child receives a Satisfactory in math, that says one thing,” she says. “But when you have a series of other objectives under there, with the potential for checking off areas of concern . . . you and the teacher can work together to help the child succeed in school.”
Some educators might bemoan the detailed report cards as another sign of the growing intrusion of academics into kindergarten.
But Bonnie Clapp, director of early education and K-5 curriculum in Burlington, Vt., says today’s standards-based world has brought an end to the 1950s model of kindergarten where students are only expected to learn social skills and their ABCs.
If nothing else, the district’s new report card reveals that local educators are trying to live up to the state’s high expectations while keeping academics “developmentally appropriate” for kindergarten students, she says.
A look at the report card reveals, for example, that while the school system recognizes the state standard that requires students to be able to use basic geometric and measurement concepts, local educators believe an appropriate skill level is for students to be to able to identify triangles, circles, and squares.
So the additional information documents very simple academic concepts. But, Clapp says, “with state standards and grade-level expectations, it’s really important we communicate . . . to parents what we think is important.”
If there’s a downside to the more detailed report cards, it’s their complexity — an issue that worried school officials during the development of the new documents.
In Bridgeport, school officials tackled that concern by piloting the new report card in 30 classrooms before going systemwide this year. In Fulton County, Ga., officials appointed parents to a committee charged with redesigning the school system’s report cards.
The committee decided to continue sending out a traditional report card. But it also will send out a “progress skills checklist” three times a year that details student success on an extensive list of skills.
“Parents felt that, at those early grades, parents needed more information than what was on the traditional report card,” says district spokesperson Mitzi Edge. “They really wanted to know more specifics that would . . . let them know what [skills] they could work on with their children.”