A better measure of student performance

I want to commend the Potsdam School District on its new policy involving grading and homework.

The way most schools in the country report student progress is antiquated and, I believe, we will wonder 20 years from now how we ever allowed such a system to exist.

Doesn't a parent need to know what skills and concepts a child has mastered as well as what information the child knows? Doesn't a university or prospective employer need this information?

When a grade on a report card is weighted to include homework, behavior and other factors, a student can get a good grade without having mastered important skills, concepts or information. Conversely, a student who has mastered important parts of the curriculum may receive a poor grade for failing to turn in homework, for being absent too often or for being a discipline problem.

By no means am I suggesting that schools ignore factors such as behavior, absences, effort and attitude. There must be significant consequences for students who are lax in any of these areas. But there also needs to be a qualitative measurement that tells parents, employers and universities exactly what skills, concepts and information a student has mastered regardless of the student's performance in these other areas.

Isn't this the way the real world works? We have statistics to measure how well a baseball player performs. However, when a team is considering signing a free agent, it also has access to information on the player's attitude, motivation and other assessments of behavior. My point is that we don't reduce a player's batting average because of his behavioral problems or attitude.

Shouldn't it be the same with students? Don't we need to know what a student knows, understands and can do, regardless of other factors such as attitude, homework reliability, ability to work with others, etc?

It is time our schools across the nation joined the real world. Schools need to report separately their assessments of what a student can actually demonstrate from how a student behaves, puts forth effort and performs in other aspects of life. University admissions departments and prospective employers need to know what parts of the curriculum students have mastered as well as whether the student has behavioral or attitudinal problems.

I congratulate Potsdam on taking a major step in the right direction with its new policy. Others will follow.

Don Mesibov

Potsdam

The writer is the director of the Institute for Learning Centered Education.