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Home » On the evolution of report cards

On the evolution of report cards

The New Neo Posted on by

A father reports on his second grader’s report card in Madison, Wisconsin:

In the old days, it was easy for my parents to see that I was slacking off in school. They would simply look at the report card and see five or six subjects with a letter between “A” and “F” next to them…

Yet after a hundred-plus years of the standard “A-F” grading system, many modern schools have deemed it to be antiquated…

This week, I received my second-grade daughter’s report card from the Madison Metropolitan School District, on which she was given a grade of “EX,” “M,” “DV,” or “E.”

According to the key provided, these abbreviations stand for:

“Exceeding” – Student consistently exceeds grade-level expectations for the end of the year.

“Meeting” – Student consistently meets grade-level expectations for the end of the year.

“Developing” – Student is developing understanding and is approaching grade-level expectations for the end of the year.

“Emerging” – Student begins to show initial understanding of grade-level expectations for the end of the year.

This grading scale, used district-wide, has been in place for a decade. But as you can see, every grade is dripping with optimism, presuming every child is on the road to excellence – the only thing they are being graded on is the speed at which they are attaining complete world knowledge.

I stand second to no one in my criticism of modern education and its “everyone gets a medal, everyone a winner” mentality. And I was a product of the old – and I mean old – New York City school system, which was rigorous in its adherence to tradition. And since the majority of my grade school teachers were born in the 19th Century (or seemed that way, anyway, because they looked so old to me), we’re talking a very traditional tradition.

But I also remember our report cards, which did not use the old A, B, C, D, F system. In fact, we only began to get number grades in junior high school, (seventh grade). Until then, we got grades that stood for words.

I can prove it, too, because in my OCD way I have saved all my old report cards. I don’t know why; perhaps for sentimentality’s sake. After all, they take up very little room in the files. And you never know when you might need them – witness, this post.

Here’s a photo of my very own first grade report card. It’s quite an education, as it were (blow it up bigger if you can’t read it very well). Note that the only possible grades were “Satisfactory” and “Needs Improvement”:

Even in second grade, where subjects started to come into play (“language arts,” social studies, science, and math) there wasn’t an ABC-type letter grade to be found. Now we had “SO” for “unusually high level of achievement,” “S” for “satisfactory,” “N” for “needs improvement,” and U for “unsatisfactory.” But almost no one ever got an “SO” and far fewer (virtually no one) got a “U.”

And that’s the way it went, right up to junior high.

Comments

On the evolution of report cards — 34 Comments

  1. I think my school went with ‘S, S-, S+’ through the 3rd grade and that would have been the late seventies.

    The ‘Developing’ and ‘Emerging’ categories on that report card are hilarious though. What would a student have to do to not meet this ridiculously low standard.

  2. “Satisfactory,” etc., were what I received in 1st grade, if I recall correctly.

    But sometime between that and fourth grade, it changed to the system used from then on through the end of high-school: A, B, C, F.

    (No D’s at all. The A, B, and C ranges were from 90-100, 80-89, and 70-79. An F was anything below 70. There were plusses and minuses possible with the A’s, B’s, and C’s, but not every teacher bothered.)

    So far as I know, none of my classmates were traumatized by this. It was just normal.

    Anyway, I’m always impatient with this instinct to shift language in order to not upset the kids, or whatever the excuse is. Kids are not stupid, and they’re pretty good at detecting adult insincerity.

    That’s why “Needs Work” and “F” are equally upsetting, or non-upsetting, when delivered to a kid. If it’s with kindness, the kid will be fine. If it’s with unconcern or condemnation, the kid will either be crushed or rebellious; but “Needs Work” won’t help with either. If the kid is rebellious, they’re more likely to have contempt for an adult who hides behind mealy-mouthed euphemisms.

  3. Having gone to public school in Queens, in the early 1950’s, your report card photo brought back many memories! One, not so pleasant memory was my first ‘N’ in reading…I was devastated! My teacher (also born I’m quite sure in the previous century) and my mother, made sure THAT didn’t happen again! Those old report cards still reside in a footlocker…

  4. We had O (outstanding), S (satisfactory), and N through second grade. All of these just seem like pointless relabelings of A-F.

    Somehow it reminds me of how racial and ethnic groups periodically find the current label inadequate and switch to a new preferred one, such as blacks who went from colored to Negro, to Afro-American, to Black, and now African-American (always amusing when applied to an actual African black).

  5. I’m from NY, but not the city. We had the same system in elementary school (early 60s for me), although I recall “O” (for outstanding) being somewhat more common. I don’t recall highly specific items like “covering mouth when coughing”; it think they were more discipline-related, like “deportment”, etc. I remember when I was acting up in 4th grade, the teacher took out my report card and added a minus sign to either an S or O on one of those line items.

    One other major change in NY state that I’ve heard about only indirectly is that the Regents Exams have gotten way less rigorous. It used to be that a Regents Diploma represented a solid achievement. Now, maybe not so much.

  6. I went to school in a small Colorado village. My teachers were all in their 30s and 40s – not ancient at all. Our grade school report cards used letter grades for academic work, but had a deportment section that used S-Satisfactory, N-Needs improvement, and U-Unsatisfactory. The Us were accompanied by a request for a parent teacher meeting. Good times. Small classes, mostly well mannered children, enjoyable play during recesses, and a decent amount of learning happened. I was blessed to be born in such a place.

  7. I recall the S, S+, S- behavior reports. I recall, but cannot document it, that my first grade teacher reported that I ate paste. My first grade teacher was young, and married. My second grade teacher got married when she was teaching us. She died several years ago. The obituary used a picture when she was young, so I easily recognized her. My teachers were middle-aged in subsequent grades.

  9. Why do we have schools? To teach children content material or socialization? Most grades are a tool to help us sort students from best-to-worst.

    I say decriminalize school truancy.

  10. We had a one time, state wide, Iowa Basic Skills exam administered in the third grade I believe. It was a bit like a very scaled down SAT exam. There were Verbal or Vocabulary and Math portions and the result was you knew your exact percentile within the state.

    On the other hand, when I went to college my dorm neighbor told me about the NY Regents exam all high school grads were required to take, and we had nothing like that. Just like Watt described.

  11. Neo- your report card looks like mine, the format, not the grades. I was on the other coast in roughly the same time frame. As far as I recall, the ABCDF grades existed all the way through high school, and even into the post-secondary. Each teacher had their own standards however: some gave A for 90-100, others made 95 the threshold. They attached numerical values 4, 3, 2, 1 (no points for F) to compute GPA.

    My kids were in high school in the 80s. They got those odd-ball grades, but they all converted them to ABCDF amongst themselves. Just like youth soccer: “we don’t keep score” so if you want to know who is winning, ask one of the kids, they knew.

    Shielding them from what the real world will do to them is no way to prepare them. They need to learn that they will be judged by someone for their entire life and they had better learn how to deal with it. Life is a contact activity;toughen up.

  12. The ladies fixed school, and fixed college..
    the old school methods were before they ran things

  13. In flyover country in the 1950s grades were A-F. You had to be smart and work hard to get an A and a total dunce or extremely lazy to get a F. I was a somewhat lazy mostly B grade student. I got As in subjects that interested me such as history and geography. Never got a D or F. Mom and dad were watching.

  14. We had the S-N style cards as well. That’s all the differentiation you need at that age. A-D is for finer sifting of talent and effort. I always wondered why there was no E before you got to the F.

    “The Us were accompanied by a request for a parent teacher meeting.” – J.J.

    A friend of mine has taught elementary school for many years, and told me about the first couple of times, when just starting out, that she had parent-teacher conferences. She would prepare diligently with all the papers showing where some child, um, needed improvement. However, on several occasions, when the parents walked into the room, she carefully slid her file on that child into the trash.

    Gringo – whatever brand of paste we used in grade school was not too bad, but I didn’t like Elmer’s glue.

  15. Maybe this would help devolve report cards back to something useful. The only problem is that the budget also suggests adding or increasing some other federal programs.

    https://thefederalist.com/2020/02/14/trump-first-president-to-budget-for-sending-education-bucks-back-to-states/

    Republicans need to stop assuming they can use big government to their own ends. Americans’ experience with that idea has repeatedly proven the real result is a bigger government more able and willing to crush our ideas, families, and communities. If you don’t want a power to fall into the hands of the enemy, don’t make that power possible. Like the One Ring, if you have it, destroy it. It’s that simple.

  16. Reps have failed to get school vouchers / school choice widely accepted, and thus we have Dem dominated Teacher Unions, and teachers in schools.

    Any grading system is useful, but changing the words is just part of the politically correct BS. And should be laughed at.

    No amount of money or programs or teachers will get most of the kids to learn at an “above average” level. However, it might be possible to have some fixed levels and, with enough teaching and discipline, or some other Finnish style program, get most of the kids to learn above those fixed levels.

    There was a recent story about a Chinese American with a child in a highly restricted, anti-creative early school. In China. LOTS of sitting, following rules very precisely (like having feet up to but not over a line at each 4 year old’s desk). Their child grew up to be very, very polite, especially in contrast with similar relatives raised in America. And not less intelligent.

    Head Start programs seem to help, a little, for a couple of years, and then after third grade, those who went thru the Head Start programs have about the same academic achievement as those who didn’t. However, their non-academic lives seemed to have better outcomes.

    Slovakia used to have numbers, 1-5. Recently (3 years ago), Universities went to an A B C D E F scale, with “E” being barely passing, and F being a fail.

    I think 5 levels is enough, and better, with a “C” being right in the middle. We certainly need a system that gives “F – fail” (or 5 with 1-high 5-bottom). Kids need to learn that failure is possible, and F is what one often gets when one fails to do any homework.

  17. In my Northern California elementary school in the mid-1950s we had something very similar to your report card above. Ours was S, I (Improvement Needed) and U. No “SO”, but very occasionally one might see an S+. That was used K-6, and we only shifted to letter grades in junior high school in 7th grade. IIRC, it was a post-WWII ‘innovation’ because older friends who started elementary school during the war recalled getting letter grades in the first few grades….

  19. I’m more concerned that the National Medical Licensing Exam (NMLE) has now gone to Pass/fail rather than the percentile that has been used for most of a century. I can guess the reason.

  20. I started first grade in 1969 and I went to school about 30 minutes north of NYC. The report card and system Neo had was very similar from what I remember up till 5th grade. In 6th grade they started using the A-F report card.

  21. In my Dayton, Ohio, elementary school, we had H, S, U in the primary grades. From their through high school, we had A-F, without the E. However, in accelerated classes, an A = 5.0, A- = 4.5, etc. so a good students could take as many accelerated classes for which they qualified and raise their GPA considerably. I was able to do this by taking summer school classes in the boring, easy A classes, (American History, algebra I) to free up my school year to take the more challenging classes which required extensive study time. Wore me out aiming so high.

  22. The school district I work in did away with letter grades and instead uses a number system, 4-1. 4 demonstrates the highest mastery of the material while 1 is the lowest. For the most part, the number system is subjective; a 3 in the eyes of one 4th grade teacher may be a 4 to another 4th grade teacher. There have been side-talks from tenured teachers who have asked what is a true 3 or 2 and so on. In this school district classes are not divided up into academic difficulty. Everyone, unless you’re in a self-contained class, for the most part receives their instruction in a general education classroom with the rest of their peers. The average student will be with the low performers and high performers. I’m quite confident the quality of instruction comes nowhere near the one-room school house found way back in the day. Student behavior is quite bad (i.e one student keeps addressing his teacher as “bro” … even though the teacher, female, has told him to stop; you’d think it be common sense to not address anyone, besides your peers, as “bro”).

  23. Feminism and Education
    https://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/sociology/education-and-sociology/feminism-and-education/

    The basic assumption shared by feminists is that the gender of divisions in society operate to the disadvantage of women. The process of gender socialisation usually encourages traditional gender roles which reinforce and justify male dominance. Feminists have shown that the so called naturalFeminism differences between men and women are not true. Women are perfectly capable of building a successful career as men are. Feminists have helped transform many of our assumptions on gender. Women no longer feel their only goal in life is marriage and children. In 1976 Sharpe interviewed girls regarding their aspirations in life. They put when love and marriage as their top priorities in life with a career at the bottom. Twenty years later, she found that a job and career were top of the list for girls with marriage and children at the bottom.

    not quite…as they have had to get tons of advantages they ignore to compete, including things that removed the hardest competitors from the game so their scores dont even show up… [we lost many of the bronx science kids… many of my contemporaries went on to do things like play in a band and party… they had no cash to go to college, neither did i… sis got enough free cash to get 6 degrees… now we are out because we are the antithesis to diversity!]

    on one hand you get an ariticle:
    women are leaving men in the dust at college

    But that ignores they are HEAVILY favored and cosseted usually by male leftist professors who also spend time negating the men till they give up and leave…
    [so are they really leaving men in the dust or are the men leaving?]

    The Silent Epidemic: Young Men Dropping Out of College
    https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-creativity-cure/201603/the-silent-epidemic-young-men-dropping-out-college

    Over the past decade, about 30% of young men have dropped out of college during their freshman year (Hartley). For those who remained, 38% completed their bachelor’s degree in four years and 58% finished within six. (National Center for Education Statistics). According to researchers, the struggles of male college freshmen have not changed much through the years, but many of today’s young men, compared to those of the past, are less resilient with regard to the challenges. For two decades, I have helped hundreds of young men and women navigate college admissions. While none of my female students have dropped out, several male students return home without degrees and often, with a sense of disappointment and despair. What it the cause of this discrepancy?

    They leave for the same reason i gave up on the SBA and its many programs that i was not able to partake in to the point there were none that i could!!!

    The person gives a ton of reasons, but NONE of them can admit that the whole melieu is hostile… we have a huge homeless crisis, which is mostly males… who are not working… why are they not working? why are skilled men who are white and heterosexual sitting on the streets begging? (they tend to focus on the more traditional homeless but ignore the demographic change)

    in the Red Pill, you get a GREAT example in the part of the documentary where the changer (we dont cover), hears what the men say, and hears the false rhetoric of the administrators and professors and such kinds of people…

    The men are figuring out that there is no way to win, so there is no sense in competing…
    [edited for length: nn)

  24. Broke men are hurting American women’s marriage prospects
    https://nypost.com/2019/09/06/broke-men-are-hurting-american-womens-marriage-prospects/

    Boo-hoo…

    marry down and suck it up like men have done for ages… no?
    why not?

    What’s interesting about this study is it admits what other studies had danced around: Women don’t want to marry men who make less money than they do.

    Previous studies focused on the fact that more women than men now go to college, and so finding college graduates to marry was proving a challenge for women. Yet it was clear even then that it wasn’t the billionaire college dropouts of the world who were having a hard time landing the ladies.

    Now we’ve cut to the heart of the matter: Women want men with dough.

    again… boo-hoo… cry us a river..

    So how bad is it? According to the study, the kind of men that single women likely would marry, if they married—i.e., the “synthetic spouses”—were not only 26 percent more likely to hold a job, and more highly educated, but they also had nearly a 55 percent higher income than what the available men in the U.S. actually make. In other words, from an economic standpoint, the dating pool lacks the kind of men that women might be particularly interested in attaching to, for the long-haul.

    well… your taking their place… so marry your girlfriends..
    i guess this was the crack in the plan they didnt tell the ladies bout the ladies theselves… i guess they thought that women with high degrees would marry a waiter the way a man with such would marry a waitress?

    guess not… boo hoo…
    we have an endless stream of complaints anyway
    but at what point do the men and others just kind of tune it out
    especially when the reason for the complaint is they got what they were told to want but it isnt what they really wanted…

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFedErr2EqY
    Joe Cocker – CRY ME A RIVER – Ultimate Collection

  25. In high school and law school it was number grades which are more precise than letters. The law school profs were tough graders.

  26. In NYS, in the 80s, in the High Peaks region of the Adirondacks near Lake Placid*, my small school district used 4,3,2,1 (4 being Outstanding and 1 being Failure) until we got to 9th grade. At 9th we switched to the A,B,C,D,F system.

    *I had relatives who went to school in Lake Placid and were able to watch the ’80 Miracle on Ice while in school. The hockey rink is connected to the school and is used today by the regions youth hockey leagues.

  27. My report cards from St. Mary’s (Catholic school, Sisters of St. Joseph) were delivered with identical assessments. There was also a sentence or two about me as a student. This was grade 1 through 8; fall of 1963 through spring of 1971.

  28. I went to elementary School in Madison, Wisconsin in the early 80s. Our “grades” went as follows:

    S – “Strength” in the area
    P – “Progress” in the area
    W- “Weakness” in the area
    I- “Improvement” needed in the area.

    Needless to say, I would have preferred traditional grades. That did not come until middle school.

  29. In the 3rd grade I received a U in conduct. You can figure out what that meant. I spent a fair amount of time in the principal’s office. Looking back, I think my father’s debilitating illness (MS) must have played a role in my acting out.

  30. I’m reminded of my own St. Paul Catholic school report card of the 50’s. I aced posture–unusual for a boy–but my penmanship was never better than a gentleman’s S, and for that I struggled.

  31. Oh boy, I remember report cards with that kind of grading system. I also remember that we had to get them signed by our parents and returned them to school.

    I never had to fake a parent’s signature; but, I do remember the nuns calling out – in front of the whole class! – those that tried to forge a parent’s signature. They never tried it more than once.

  33. Attended NYS public schools in the 80’s and early 90’s – we had the same 1-4 scale that Fractal Rabbit described, though I remember going to numerical percent grades once we hit 7th grade – e.g., 95% rather than A – for academic classes.

  34. I got a hell of a lot of “NIs” in elementary school, and I can assure you my parents knew exactly what that meant!

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