Premium ContentMouse over Home then click on Premium Content for information.Students and parents who had gotten used to the Omaha Public Schools' new grading plan can expect more changes in the fall.
A year after overhauling its grading system, OPS officials are planning more adjustments, including a revised grading scale.
The new grading system, called standards-based grading, was rolled out during the 2010-11 school year amid criticism and worries from students, parents and teachers.
The grading plan is intended to make sure report cards accurately reflect student knowledge as opposed to other factors, such as attendance, their diligence in doing homework, classroom behavior or differences among individual teachers.
Numerous districts across the Omaha metro area and elsewhere have embraced standards-based grading, to varying degrees. And some, like OPS, have encountered criticism.
The Westside Community Schools, for instance, switched from the traditional A, B and C grades to a new lineup of 3, 2 and 1 for its elementary and middle schoolers. That led some parents to object to the changes at a school board meeting last fall, saying the system compromises the district's mission of excellence in education because students thrive for proficiency — a 3 — instead of excellence.
Westside has since brought in an outside consultant, K12 Insight, to solicit feedback from students, parents and staff. The district installed the new grading plan in grades K-6 last school year; this year, it's also being used in grades 7 and 8.
"It's a huge change for people," said Sue Evanich, Westside's assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction. "You can't communicate with parents enough."
Last school year, OPS adopted a five-point standards-based system in grades 5-12. The district also encountered initial problems. Parents raised concerns about how the changes could affect their child's learning and grades. And not all teachers were trained on the grading system until six months into last school year.
But the push for the latest change — a switch to a four-point grading scale — is coming from teachers, OPS administrators said.
Teachers initially wanted the five-point scale to give them more room at the bottom of the scale to distinguish among varying levels of student effort, said Chris Proulx, president of the Omaha Education Association, the OPS teachers union.
But the scale befuddled teachers who were unsure what score to give a student who didn't do a project at all versus a student who did the project but got it all wrong.
"The five-point scale didn't really work well," Proulx said.
Too many students were receiving passing grades without doing the work, officials decided last school year.
For this school year, OPS adjusted the bottom of the scale, requiring students to receive a higher mark on the scale to pass a class. The district has seen its percentage of F's increase in some classes this year, though the number of failing grades is still lower than under the original grading plan.
For next school year, OPS will use a 4-point grading scale, much like the traditional 4.0 scale high schools use to calculate grade-point averages.
The Council Bluffs school district, which switched to standards-based grading in the 2008-09 school year, also uses a 4.0 scale.
"We thought it was simple for parents to understand," said Ann Mausbach, the district's executive director of curriculum and instruction. "It matches up with an A, B, C, D (system), which is what parents are used to."
OPS also distributed standards-based grading guides to all teachers in September, in hopes of improving consistency.
Last year, said Gail Formanack, OPS director of secondary education, "everybody pretty much made up their own" grading guides.
OPS officials say the revised grading scale, along with the guides, will improve the system.
"We are going to have one set of grading practices for every single teacher in the district," said ReNae Kehrberg, OPS assistant superintendent of curriculum and learning. "We're moving in the right direction."
For students, the standards-based system has changed more than how their grades are calculated.
Students also are being given more opportunities to make up homework or retake tests, said Matt Brandl, principal at Morton Magnet Middle School, northwest of 96th and Ames.
Morton, for instance, has an after-school program where students can get help with homework and retake quizzes, Brandl said.
"It gets the kids where they need to be," he said. "They just need to show us they can do it."
Ken O'Connor, author of the book "How to Grade for Learning," helped develop the standards-based grading approach and has served as a consultant for numerous districts, including OPS.
He said changes are sometimes needed a couple of years into the switch to standards-based grading, if districts don't adequately communicate with teachers and parents early on.
"If they do it well in the first place, there's not a lot of tweaking," O'Connor said. "The more broad-based the (planning) committee and the better communication with stakeholders while that is going on, generally, the smoother the implementation will go."
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