Letter Grades to stay- For now

I've blogged before about a proposed change to the grading system for elementary schools in Palm Beach County. The school board led by member Ann Robinson was going to scrap the traditional A-F grades for a 1-3 system.

I thought this was a dumb idea all along. The vast majority of schools in the US use the A-F system, the reasons being given for the change made little sense, plus the new grading system had little mean. All strong reasons not to make any changes. Now as reported in today's Palm Beach Post, the Palm Beach County School board has delayed implementing the changes.

But at their monthly meeting Tuesday, elementary principals decided they needed more time to sell the idea of report cards without letter grades to parents, teachers and the community.

For weeks, parents critical of the change have collected petitions and spoken at school board meetings, complaining that children working above grade level were lumped in with average students. Last week, four school board members said they wanted letter grades for elementary students.

The response from the community prompted Superintendent Art Johnson to give the county's 100-plus elementary school principals two options: Either show up at today's workshop to show their support or delay the plan.

"We clearly haven't done what we need to have done to educate parents about the report card," Johnson said. "It's going to take some time and understanding to get through that.

"It's a timing issue. The principals and I just felt we need to be responsive to the board and responsive to the parents."

The district will continue to study the elementary report card, Johnson said. There are no plans to remove marks for each skill within a subject area.

In general I think Art Johnson has done a good job as school superintendant here. The citizens of this county were poorly served for too long by a sucession of school superintendants who rather serve themselves or special interests rather than the needs of the children in the county.

However this time I strongly feel Mr. Johnson and his colleagues are badly misguided. The 1-3 system is vague and useless. A 3 for instance could be anything from satisfactory to excellent work. In what way was this better than An A, B or C? I don't see it and apparently neither do the majority of parents in the county.

So the matter has been shelved for now. I think the board and Mr. Johnson are in denial over their idea. Time isn't going to change parents and school principals minds on this subject, because the new system is no good. I sincerely hope parents keep the pressure up and this dumb idea gets totally scraped at some time in the future.

Stay tuned.