School Report Cards Failing the Test of Reason
Barry Maley
Published in The Daily Telegraph 30/12/99
This is the season for end-of-year school reports. An acquaintance of mine, let’s call him Bill, passed on to me a copy of his child’s Year 6 end-of-year report from a North Shore public school. Bill wants to do the best for his child and takes a keen interest in his education. Research has shown us how important parental engagement is for children’s education. Other things being equal—children’s intelligence and health , for example—parental interest and help with schooling can add significantly to a child’s educational achievement and commitment. Such parents can be a school’s best friends if educational excellence is the aim. The school report is a vital element in linking parents, teachers and children in the common educational enterprise. It should serve two essential purposes. The first is to inform the parents of their child’s progress as measured by the acquisition of knowledge in specific subjects, the development of a range of skills, and the quality of performance compared to class mates. The second is to tell the parents, whose taxes pay for their children’s schooling, how well the school is doing in performing its part of the bargain. A report that leaves parents and child ignorant about progress in these respects is virtually worthless, and undermines the possibility of parental cooperation and confidence in the system. Which brings me to Bill’s outrage.He complained vehemently that despite his son’s seven-page report on seventeen ‘learning areas’, subdivided into ninety-one assessment categories, he still had little idea whether his son was reading and writing well or poorly; whether he could spell as well as most of his peers; whether he had trouble with arithmetic; what kinds of computation he had mastered; whether he was last, first, or middle, in his class in anything; and whether he needed help from his parents in any areas and, if so, what kind of help. He wanted to know what reasonable expectations he should have of his son so that he could be realistic and fair in dealing with him. He believes parents and children are being given a bland, imprecise and reassuring picture, short on figures and plain statements, in order to pacify parents, protect teachers, and exclude all peer comparisons in the interests of the child’s ‘self esteem’. For example, the Reading, Writing, Spelling, and Mathematics ‘learning areas’ have three grades of assessment for particular skills in each area: ‘Working Towards’; ‘Has Achieved’; and ‘Working Beyond’. So for Writing, the teacher may place a tick in the ‘Has Achieved’ box for ‘uses correct punctuation’, and a tick in the ‘Working Towards’ box for ‘summarises and makes notes’. And so on for the other learning areas. So the parent receives several pages of ticks in boxes and an overall summary for each learning area with a tick in one or other of the boxes headed ‘low’, ‘satisfactory’, ‘good’, ‘high’, or ‘outstanding’. At the end of the report there is a space for ‘teachers’ comments’ running to about 7or 8 lines of comment.
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For Bill, and those of us who remember the public school reports of some years ago, the complete absence nowadays of marks for subjects based on examinations and written work, expressed as a percentage and presented alongside the class average mark, makes it difficult to get a reasonably accurate handle on how a child is performing. If, under the present system, a parent is told—by a tick in a box—that a son or daughter is ‘working towards’ ‘making three dimensional objects and representing them in two dimensions using simple perspective elevations and isometric drawings’, does this mean that the child is up to scratch or seriously retarded?
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In one other public school Year 6 report I have seen from a different school, the child’s ‘Working Towards’ box is ticked 8 times for various knowledge areas of a major aspect of mathematics. The inference is (since the ‘Achieved’ box is unticked) that the child concerned is lagging behind, perhaps seriously, in this core subject. But there is no comment or explanation given and no indication of what the school or the parents might do about it.
Another friend of mine, ‘Tom’, also has a son who has just completed Year 6; but in a private school on the North Shore. The contrast in his school report is remarkable. There are figures, marks, percentages and grades everywhere, including an effort grading, and performance marks contrasted against the class average, together with many lines of comment about performance, attitudes, and progress by the class teacher, Housemaster and Principal. A parent reading such a report would be in no doubt about a child’s relative performance and the areas where attention and perhaps help are needed. And the child, too, is treated as an individual who can cope with such knowledge about him or her self.
Comparing even this small sample of private and public school reports, one is struck by an atmosphere of deviousness and avoidance of precise statements and quantitative measures in the public schools’ approach. One wonders whether the intention is to disarm and reassure parents and to leave pupils with illusions about themselves rather than risk unwelcome reactions to evidence of school underperformance.
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Barry Maley is Senior Fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies and director of its Taking Children Seriously programme of research.
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