a:\doc\web\98\08\lkrept.txt From: "Goldsmith, Julie" To: "'arthurhu@halcyon.com'" , "wa-math-sci@mickey.esd113.wedne" , "wa-legislation@inspire.ospi.wed" , "wa-esslrngs@whitecap.psesd.wedn" Subject: RE: Lake Washington's New OBE Standards-Based Report Card Date: Sat, 17 Oct 1998 14:03:35 -0700 Sender: owner-wa-math-sci@mickey.esd113.wednet.edu Precedence: bulk Reply-To: wa-math-sci@esd113.wednet.edu Status: Mr. Hu's descriptions of the proposed new Lake Washington School District report card s fairly accurate. I would be interested to know what other districts or teachers are doing to help provide better information about student learning. This could be a healthy new topic for this group! Our idea is to create new reporting system that will * Be based on local curriculum standards and state EALRs * Reflect what students have learned * Involve students meaningfully * Provide for objective, consistent and clear feedback * Communicate useful information to parents, students, and teachers * Encourage future learning * Show progress of learning over time We are starting with grades kindergarten through 8th grade and will expand to 9-12th next year. We are trying to incorporate the EALRs, WASL information and standardized tests as components that will help provide parents, teachers and students with a complete picture of a child's learning. The report cards have 4major sections: Academic progress- provides information on student work over the course of a specific grading period. Tied to our Curriculum Framework and the state EALRs Progress to Standards- provides information on a child's current performance in comparison to the established Lake Washington School District Standard (this will be sent home at the end of each year) Standardized Measures- provides information on standardized assessments translated to a scale that compares the child performance to the expected district standard. Goal Setting- asks students to reflect on their own learning and set yearly goals We will be piloting these new report cards with 200 teachers across the district. Input from parents, students and teachers will be critical throughout the year to help refine and create a meaningful new system. A small correction I would like to make to Mr. Hu's description of our reporting system: he states that we have a scoring guide of "it starts with a bad idea (standards-based 1-4 scoring, 1=sucks, 2=falls short, 3=meets standard, 4=exceeds) " our actual guide is: 1 = beginning the standard 2 = approaching the standard 3 = proficient 4 = exceeds the standard. The plan is to create district-wide performance criteria that will provide teachers with the guidelines on how to score a student -----Original Message----- From: arthurhu@halcyon.com [mailto:arthurhu@halcyon.com] Sent: Friday, October 16, 1998 7:26 AM To: wa-math-sci@mickey.esd113.wedne; wa-legislation@inspire.ospi.wed; wa-esslrngs@whitecap.psesd.wedn Cc: kclp@ix.netcom.com Subject: Lake Washington's New OBE Standards-Based Report Card Mail*Link¨ SMTP Lake Washington's New OBE Standards-Based Report Card Lake Washington's New Proposed OBE standards-based report card http://www.leconsulting.com/arthurhu/images/98/10/15/page0001.html look at files rept00-07.gif for image scans of report card Julie Goldsmith came to the AG Bell elementary from the district curriculum office to show off her brainchild, the new standards-based report card. She even said it was based on "standards-based" education, which happens to be Marc Tucker's latest name for discredited "outcome based education". She said "isn't it good to be able to guarantee that every student meets minimum standards?" She didn't want to hear about standards that are set so that they flunk 80% of kids, and the MEDIAN 50% gets a 1=demonstrates zilch. No it's not final, but what they've got scares the socks off me. I thought the WASL standards-based test had problems but everybody thought I was really off my rocker with the report card. Heck, the parents loved this stuff, I was the lone wacko, and the principal said she'd have to have a meeting with me to figure out how to attend these meeting without being "confrontational" and "disruptive". The district has no standard report card that is widely used, it is not even standardized within each elementary school They've put together a big standards commmittee, and invited parents to review their process, much like the "grass roots" system used to create the state assessment that is completely closed to real public input. What they came up with looks like nothing I've ever seen from the ed loop or from any other school district. It starts with a bad idea, scoring a test according to some commitee's wild idea of grade expectations, and takes it even further into uncharted territory by rating a child's "progress" towards meeting grade 5 standards STARTING IN GRADE 3 which have not yet been set. If anybody else as similar goofball report cards, I'd appreciate it. I should post my kids' kindergarten report card too, I'll get to that later. 1st part is extension of E=excel S=Satisfactory I=Improving N=Needs Improvement scale in use since 1980s. ABC grades don't start until middle school. It doesn't look practical because it breaks down math by "strand", so you would get a separate grade for math sense, probability, etc. The WASL doesn't even give you a score broken down this way, I don't know how a teacher is supposed to even assess these skill vs. he's good, OK, or bad in math, generally if you're good in one area, you're good in another, it's not a matter of you need more help in this or that area (multiple intelligences again??) The 2nd part of the report is what's scary because it starts with a bad idea (standards-based 1-4 scoring, 1=sucks, 2=falls short, 3=meets standard, 4=exceeds), and makes it worse, it graded on progression 1-starts 4-meets 5th grade standard showing progress starting in 3rd grade. This is truly nuts, since even the best students will start out at 1, and there is no way to judge if a "2" IN 4th grade is good or bad, or how that compares with where they are supposed to be. Which of these reports is good? Better? Average? G3 G4 G5 1 3 3 1 2 4 2 2 2 How would you rate a student in the top 1% of the class? How would you rate a student who is at the 50% level? If you have any ideas, I'll pass them on to Ms. Goldsmith because right now she doesn't have the foggiest idea either how this work. Who gets to figure how what % correct counts as "proficient"?? at grade level? At end of grade 3? Middle of grade 4? You simply can't score this way unless you give every kid a cumulative G3-G5 skills test 3 times a year. (grades are reported 3 times per year), and you're simply wasting your time testing G3 kids on G5 content (but that's not a problem with the WASL, is it when they now say they deliberately put G7 and G10 problems in G4 just to challenge the kids a bit, but they didn't tell the standard setting committee) I don't think it will harm the kids, it will only confuse the teachers who have to score this thing and the parents who try to interpret it. Predictably, they said that they haven't worked out the performance levels, but they claim that with sophisticated "rubrics", it will be much more objective than letter grades. Now we're going to get the Siskel and Ebert "performance-based / holistic" scoring system giving a thumbs up or down on our kids when we can't even get the state to come up with a reasonable "standard" of performance. How are they going to set a district "standard" that is uniform across schools? When teachers tried scoring the CLAS test in CA, they found that scores were completely useless for comparison across schools, especially when it was the teacher more than the students who got the consequences of low scores. ------------------ RFC822 Header Follows ------------------ Received: by qmserver.lkwash.wednet.edu with ADMIN;16 Oct 1998 14:24:04 -0800 Received: by whitecap.psesd.wednet.edu (5.x/SMI-SVR4-Whitecap1) id AA14494; Fri, 16 Oct 1998 14:19:58 -0700 Received: from exchange.raima.com by whitecap.psesd.wednet.edu (5.x/SMI-SVR4-Whitecap1) id AA14488; Fri, 16 Oct 1998 14:19:55 -0700 Message-Id: <9810162119.AA14488@whitecap.psesd.wednet.edu> Received: from arthurhu (dhcp35.raima.com [198.206.247.146]) by exchange.raima.com with SMTP (Microsoft Exchange Internet Mail Service Version 5.5.1960.3) id VAQCS3D6; Fri, 16 Oct 1998 14:11:55 -0700 From: "arthur hu" To: wa-math-sci@mickey.esd113.wednet.edu, wa-legislation@inspire.ospi.wednet.edu, wa-esslrngs@whitecap.psesd.wednet.edu Date: Fri, 16 Oct 1998 14:11:48 -0700 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7BIT Subject: Lake Washington's New OBE Standards-Based Report Card Reply-To: arthurhu@halcyon.com Cc: kclp@ix.netcom.com Priority: normal X-Mailer: Pegasus Mail for Win32 (v3.01b) Sender: owner-wa-esslrngs@whitecap.psesd.wednet.edu Precedence: bulk