Editorial: Report cards are sending parents the wrong signals

Most students in the U.S. aren't proficient in reading or math - but you wouldn't know it by looking at their report cards. Four out of 5 parents say their children are getting B's or higher. Test scores, meanwhile, have hit multiyear lows. According to one study, 60% of grades don't match standardized assessments.

One might hope such a discrepancy would set off alarm bells. Yet surveys show that parents are more inclined to trust report cards than test results. The upshot: Not only are measures of student performance diverging, but parents are also looking at the wrong signals.

This achievement mirage has serious consequences. Researchers found that when grades are high and test scores low, parents are less likely to invest in academic support. They'll wait until grades start falling. So while surveys suggest that informed parents are eager to intervene, many don't know they should be worried. Talk about a crisis wasted.

Grade inflation has been seeping through the nation's education system for decades and worsened during the pandemic. Although elite universities have borne the brunt of public criticism for lenient grading in recent years, the practice has become standard in K-12 classrooms, too. According to a survey of test takers for a common college-entrance exam, 54% reported earning A's in math in 2022, up from 43% a decade earlier. The trend is similar for English, science and social studies.

Today, more than half of schools use at least one "alternative grading" strategy, including "no zeros," scrapping penalties for late work, and allowing unlimited revisions and retakes for tests. Other practices - such as "mastery" grading - aim to eliminate traditional letter grades altogether, relying instead on a combination of feedback and numerical scales (0-4, say) or performance benchmarks ("emerging," "developing," "proficient," "advanced").

It isn't hard to see how such measures might obscure academic weaknesses and mislead parents. Is a "developing" reader performing at grade level? Has a student who earned a "3" learned her multiplication facts? Euphemistic teacher feedback does little to illuminate things. Parents are rightly "shocked" when they learn that their A-and-B student is three grade levels behind.

To be sure, traditional grading rubrics have their flaws. Grades have been criticized for perpetuating bias, provoking anxiety and rewarding rich kids whose families can invest in extra tutoring. These problems shouldn't be minimized. But research suggests that low-income students perform worse under more subjective grading regimes, while their parents often lack the resources to help them make up lost ground.

The goal, then, should be twofold: to better align grades with grade-level expectations and communicate more honestly with parents about any discrepancies. Incorporating standardized-test results into report cards - with a student's percentile ranking by school, district and nation - would be a good place to start. Federal grants likewise should be tied to higher reporting standards. Over time, transparency about test scores and grades should narrow the gap between them, as schools find such inconsistencies increasingly hard to justify to parents and the public. Administrators, for their part, should train teachers to have frank conversations with families and ensure their support. Fear of angry parents is a poor excuse to withhold critical information.

It's worth emphasizing that any attempt to incorporate testing into report cards will require states to release scores faster. Despite administering tests digitally, some states wait several months before informing students of their scores - sometimes well into the next academic year. Such delays mean test scores aren't available before a child moves to the next grade, foreclosing opportunities for kids to catch up over the summer.

No test or grading policy can fully capture a student's strengths. But parents shouldn't be blind to their kids' weaknesses. Only a clear diagnosis can remedy what ails American education.

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The Editorial Board publishes the views of the editors across a range of national and global affairs.

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