Blocking Parents

I farm out my taxes to an accountant.  I simply can’t read tax forms: the grids, the numbers, the blanks, the jargon.  Though I think of myself as a literate person, tax forms strike me as chaotic and opaque.  Hand it over to H&R Block.

Some parents feel the same way about new report cards called standard-based reports.  They include numbers instead of letters—scales of 1-4 rather than F-A.  An article describes these new report cards as

part of a new system flourishing around the country as the latest frontier in a 20-year push to establish rigorous academic standards and require state tests on the material.

Though I question whether “Educators praise them for setting clear expectations” it makes sense that parents are finding the report cards unclear.  The letter scale “’is ingrained in us,” Mr.Tirozzi said. “It’s the language which college admissions officers understand; it’s the language which parents understand.”’ 

Any method of accountability is paradoxical: it both tries to standardize student learning while also trying to assess an individual learner’s abilities.  However, having accepted the fact that such report cards will be the norm for quite a while longer, schools would be wise and responsible to reach out to parents and help them learn to read these kinds of reports.  The worst thing that can happen is to have a parent, at home, disregarding a report from school because it is opaquely represented.  In such a scenario, the parent models for the child to disregard schoolwork, even if they don’t mean to. 

Perhaps while schools are helping enhance parents’ rubric-reading abilities, they can also provide assistance in cracking another unreadable text: tax forms. 

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