Report cards show parents how to help schools, expert says

Eichold-Mertz School of Math, Science and Technology

Eichold-Mertz School of Math, Science and Technology in Mobile County was one of only four schools in Alabama to earn a perfect 100 score on the 2018 state report card

The second round of letter grades for Alabama’s K-12 schools was released over the holiday break. Some education officials celebrated the grades, while others said nothing at all.

After multiple delays, state education officials finally went live Jan. 5 with the details behind the letter grades, but the federally-required information was still not online by publication time of this article.

Critics of grading schools say education is too complicated to boil down to a single letter grade. Proponents say the single letter grade is something parents can easily understand.

Learning Heroes has been working with and listening to parents for several years to figure out what parents want in a report card to help states present the loads of information required to share through the passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act, or ESSA, in 2015, the successor to No Child Left Behind.

The organization’s founder and president, Bibb Hubbard, said research they conducted shows parents are not only eager to see the school-based report card but are also using the information in it to determine how to be better engaged in their child’s education.

"That's a good thing," Hubbard said, because it means those school report cards are helping parents gain a better understanding of what's happening with their child.

For example, if a parent knows their child is getting a 'B,' but the school earns a 'D,' Hubbard said, "Parents put it together that their child really probably isn't a 'B' student but may be more like a 'C' student."

“They are able to do this calculation to contextualize their child’s experience,” she said, in relation to what the school report card shows about the school’s overall measures.

Report cards can also galvanize support for a school that is struggling, she said. But, she said, if parents don't have information telling them that the school has a problem, they likely won't think there is one.

Hubbard said she is encouraged by research showing 61 percent of parents participating in a nationally-representative online survey said if they learned a school was struggling, they would learn how to get more involved in their school to help improve it.

Parents want to see that schools have a plan to improve, she said, and they'll say, "we're in this together as a community and we can do better."

"When parents saw schools that were over time getting better," she said, "they were more comfortable sending their child to that school than pulling their child out and sending them somewhere else."

But, Hubbard said, state education officials need to do more than just put report card information and data online for parents to view.

"The school-based report card in particular is not something parents are currently familiar with," Hubbard said, and telling parents why the information in the school report card matters is crucial.

If parents can't understand what the report card shows, she said, they could simply tune it out.

"It isn't a language that parents speak," she said. "We encourage states to use language parents can understand without having to pull out a dictionary."

Adding context to the indicators goes a long way in helping parents understand why the information is gathered and reported, she said. "It is really essential for parents to understand what they're looking at and what they're supposed to do about it," she said.

Giving parents some context, even just a couple of sentences, can help them understand how to use the information they're seeing. Learning Heroes produced a sample report card to help states create their own.

Their research showed terms like “growth” and “climate” can be misinterpreted without including basic explanations on the report card.

For example, she said, parents thought the word climate, which educators use to describe the overall feeling of safety and security and wellness at school, is connected to whether the air conditioner is working.

Parents have interpreted "growth" to mean increases in enrollment, she said, or even how much children are individually growing in height.

With federal law requiring 21 pieces of information be made available on the report card, Hubbard said her organization wanted to know what parents were really interested in. Hubbard said parents know their child is “more than a test score” and want to see multiple indicators of what is happening in a school.

At the top of the list? "[Parents] are very interested in teacher qualifications," she said. "Obviously, the academic measures are important, but so is the school environment. Disciplinary data is also very important to parents."

All of that information will be part of Alabama's Unified Report card, and while academic measures are now online, the rest of it is currently tucked away in documents quietly posted to the state department's website just before the end of the year.

Hubbard said it’s important not to shame or blame parents or teachers with report card information, as their research showed parents feel ownership of the data in the school along with the educators.

"Helping parents see that this is an opportunity, now we have this data---it's really important to acknowledge it---and what are we going to do about it?"

How schools decide to share the information with their families will make the difference in how people receive it, she said.

For her part, Hubbard is encouraged by the possibilities school report cards offer. “There’s a lot of opportunity in making sure that parents have access to [the report card], can understand it and interpret it,” Hubbard said. “Then they will use it to help improve their child school and where their child is going.”