No more letter grades? Here’s what Fort Worth ISD parents will see on report cards

In the next few years, parents of elementary students in the Fort Worth Independent School District will no longer see letter grades on their kids’ report cards.

Fort Worth ISD officials are planning to shift to a new grading model for lower grades that shows parents how students are performing against state standards instead of a raw percentage for each subject. It’s one of a pair of changes the district is making with an eye toward giving parents more information about how their kids are doing academically.

Eventually, district officials plan to use the new standards-based grading model from pre-K through fifth grade. But that change represents a major shift from how teachers have assessed students in the past, and it will take years to implement, said Gracie Guerrero, the district’s associate superintendent of learning and leading.

“Obviously, it’s not going to happen automatically,” she said.

FWISD’s new grading model will line up with TEKS

After the change, rather than seeing a percentage grade and a letter grade on their kids’ report cards, parents will see an accounting of how well they’re doing on each concept included in that year’s Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills, the state’s curriculum standards. That system will offer teachers the ability to assess where students are on individual skills, rather than broad subject areas, Guerrero said. Having that ability will mean the teachers and parents are better equipped to help students close specific learning gaps, she said.

The district began phasing the new grading system in at the pre-K level this year, Guerrero said. Districts across Texas began implementing new state-mandated guidelines for pre-K at the beginning of the school year, and district officials decided it would make sense to make both changes at once, she said.

Officials are collecting feedback from pre-K teachers about how the model worked this year, and any changes that need to be made, Guerrero said. They’re also working to identify certain grades and subjects that can serve as pilot programs for the change next year, she said, so officials could get a better look at how the model works at a broader selection of grade levels.

If those pilot programs are successful, the district could roll the model out across all elementary grades as soon as the 2025-26 school year, Guerrero said, but it’s possible the full rollout won’t happen until the following year.

Although standards-based grading could be beneficial for students at every grade level, Guerrero said establishing the model at the middle and high school levels would be more complicated. Beginning in middle school, the courses students take count against requirements they have to fulfill before they graduate, and many high school students take dual credit classes through Tarrant County College. Trying to line the new system up with state graduation requirements and the community college’s grading structure would create headaches for all parties involved, Guerrero said.

FWISD parents need better access to information, advocate says

Besides changing the grading model, the district is also working on upgrades to its parent portal, the system parents use to look up information such as their kids’ grades, attendance and test scores. Officials say the upgraded version of the portal will give parents clearer information about whether their kids are performing on grade level.

Trenace Dorsey-Hollins, director of the education advocacy group Parent Shield Fort Worth, said she hopes the changes will put parents in a better position to help them if they’re children are struggling. Lack of access to information has been an ongoing challenge for parents in the district, she said.

The organization, which lobbied the district for both changes, held a series of literacy clinics across the city last summer. Parents brought their kids in to take reading assessments administered by licensed teachers, and the organization’s leaders were on hand to walk parents through the results and talk to them about what to do with that information. Over and over, Dorsey-Hollins said, parents told her that they were shocked to learn that their kids were behind in reading, in some cases by several grade levels. Many of those parents said they’d never sought out extra help for their kids because they didn’t know they needed it, she said.

Following those conversations, the group’s leaders began working with Fort Worth ISD parents to get them connected with the parent portal. But they quickly realized that the portal was little help to any parent who needed more information about how their kids were doing, she said. While some other districts’ parent portals clearly show whether students are performing on grade level and how they scored on state tests compared to others at their school, across the district and statewide, Fort Worth ISD’s portal shows only a raw test score, with no information about what the score means.

“It shows nothing relevant to how the kids are doing,” Dorsey-Hollins said. “It almost looks like an eyeglass prescription.”

Likewise, report cards don’t give parents a complete or accurate picture of how their kids were doing, Dorsey-Hollins said. During the literacy clinics, many students tested well behind grade level, despite bringing home As in reading on their report cards, she said. She’s hopeful that the shift to standards-based grading will give parents more information not only about whether their kids are behind, but also about the particular areas in which they’re struggling. With that information, parents will be in a better position to offer their kids extra help or find tutoring if they need it, she said.

“That’s why a lot of kids are going years and years without parents getting involved, because they don’t know,” Dorsey-Hollins said.

Report cards don’t always reflect student achievement

Across North Texas and nationwide, parents and education advocates say the grades students get in school don’t show a complete picture of how they are doing academically. That’s at least in part because grades take into account a number of other factors besides student achievement, like class participation, behavior and homework completion, that don’t necessarily have anything to do with whether the student has mastered the concepts and skills covered in class.

Research suggests those grading practices may be leaving parents with the false impression that their kids don’t need any extra help. In a survey conducted in May on behalf of the Fort Worth Education Partnership and the Sid W. Richardson Foundation, 80% of parents who live in the Fort Worth ISD boundaries said they believed their kids could read on grade level. But in public schools across the city, just 44% of students scored on grade level in reading on last year’s state test, according to an analysis of testing data by the Fort Worth Education Partnership.

That disconnect mirrors national trends. In a study conducted in March by the education advocacy group Learning Heroes, 92% of parents surveyed told researchers they were confident their kids were reading on grade level, and about 80% said their kids brought home all As and Bs on the report cards. But only about a third of fourth-graders across the country were either proficient or advanced in reading in 2022, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, sometimes known as the Nation’s Report Card.

Standards-based model more accurately reflects student learning

Ken O’Connor, a Toronto-based education consultant who works with school districts across the U.S. and Canada on grading practices, said one of the most important advantages of standards-based grading is that it gives parents more detailed information about how their kids are doing. Because traditional letter-based grading systems give students a single rating for broad subject areas, they can mask areas where students are struggling, he said. For example, an elementary-aged student who has mastered all of the building blocks of reading but struggles with text comprehension could still receive an A or B in reading, even though they can’t read proficiently.

Besides being too broad to be very useful, letter-based grading systems also have issues with accuracy, O’Connor said. The fact that traditional grading systems generally include other factors like behavior means that students who work hard and are compliant generally get inflated grades, and those who achieve at high levels but aren’t compliant get deflated grades, he said.

Standards-based grading solves both of those problems by separating behavior from academic achievement and more clearly outlining how students are doing on each concept, not just in each subject area overall, O’Connor said. Grading models are generally tailored to state standards, which gives parents more context to understand whether their kids are behind or on target, he said. And if students do need extra help, that information can help parents more narrowly target their efforts toward the areas where their kids are struggling.

Standards-based grading models can look different from one district to the next, O’Connor said, but they all contain three essential elements: they clearly state the learning goals for each academic year, they’re based on levels of proficiency instead of letters or percentages, and they only take account of a student’s academic achievement, not their behavior or effort.

O’Connor said he’s seen the benefits of the standards-based model in his own family. He has three grandkids in school: twins in 11th grade and a granddaughter in second grade. If he asks the high schoolers, who go to a school with a traditional grading model, how they’re doing, they can tell him a single percentage for every subject. But the second grader, who goes to a school that uses standards-based grading, can tell him the specific skills that she’s mastered and the ones she still struggles on. That information is far more useful for students and parents than a single percentage, he said.

“It’s about the learning,” O’Connor said. “It’s not about numbers that really don’t mean a whole hell of a lot.”