When you ask first graders if they can dance – they say yes. If you ask first graders if they can paint – they say yes. If you ask first graders if they can sing – they say yes. The answer to life when you are six is YES.

Then how could there be any reasoning in giving letter grades to children? In our experiences of working with young children in the Chicago schools letter grades are a way of shouting NO at a child.

Katie Osgood, a fellow Chicago activist and blogger, and I meet several times a year to discuss education topics. The last time we got together we talked about the grading system required in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS). Katie is returning to teaching for CPS and wanted to explore ways that progressive educators handle the tension between what we know is right for children and what our system is asking us to do. We both wondered how we survive assigning grades as ethically as we can within the stringent and restrictive grading policies placed upon us.

While we were talking we said we should be writing this down. So we did.

To start, readers will need background on the grading system used in Chicago elementary schools. And yes, you will be horrified. Our system uses the same report card from first to eighth grade, using letter grades for each subject area. The letter grades are based on standards. We are supposed to be using Common Core standards in Reading and Math, but the report cards have not been changed to reflect this.

According to Chicago Public Schools’ scale an A indicates that a child is significantly exceeding standards, a B is exceeding standards, and a C is meeting standards.

The first questions that Katie and I have are, what does “grade level” mean and who gets to decide? And if learning to read and mathematical understandings are achieved on a wide continuum, are we labeling children as failures when they have just started their schooling?

We have also informally polled educators around the country, and we find that large urban schools seem to be the holdouts when it comes to letter grade report cards for elementary students. It is not a system of reporting student progress with student learning or justice in mind.

My framework in building a philosophy of grading comes from being an early childhood educator; and Katie’s from a special education standpoint. As you can tell from the opening scenario, we both feel assigning letter grades to young children is ridiculous. But if our school system requires teachers to grade young children, what purpose could these grades hold?

First of all, we believe grades should be a communication between teacher and parent of a child’s progress, not a comparison of one child to another. We strongly agree that parents should not share letter grades with their children. Our goal is to teach children to learn, not to form judgments about themselves based on an arbitrary standards.

So, in this context, what do we grade? We are determined to do this well, and that requires justification for the grades we assign.

Most learning in younger grades does not take place on paper. Children in the early years are building understandings through games, activities, and social learning. In fact, it is very hard to give individual children credit for the work being done – the knowledge is built collectively. That is why we try to use as much observational data as possible. Not an easy task and all the efforts in the world to use checklists or a continuum of skills fall short of truly describing what we see. And then there are times when the learning just needs to come to a halt and we need to administer a quick, short check in to see how everyone is doing. This being said, we refuse to be grading machines, and want to spend most of our time joyously directing children’s learning. We have yet to develop a system that works seamlessly for us.

The next salient question is – how would we change this if we could?

When we peel away all the issues, on a fundamental basis we do not believe in grades at all, but do think feedback is extremely important. And we are very clear that grades and feedback are two different animals. One solution that many of Chicago’s suburban schools use is a narrative report card, but this more than likely would be cumbersome for Chicago teachers. Most of us are teaching more than 30 children in a class, and our special education instructors already produce a narrative report card based on IEP goals in addition to mountains of paperwork. We also have misgivings about a checklist based on the Common Core Standards, in that we do not believe the standards reflect true developmental learning in the early grades.

So, we were left at a dead end. We agree that teachers should provide parents and children with usable feedback, but what should this look like?

Our friend and child advocate, Karen Fraid came up with the best answer we have had yet:

You know what I have always found interesting? Nobody has ever devised a system (to my knowledge) that works backwards from the sorts of questions parents actually have about how their kids are doing. I hear from parents everywhere, no matter whether they have grades or some other system that they have to translate the report into language that they understand. A report card needs to work backwards from parent concerns. Survey the concerns parents have and find a way to build a system around answering those questions clearly and constructively. Survey teachers to find ideas to streamline the system and make it as un-stressful as possible. And leave the bureaucrats out of it. That last one will be the tough one.

Karen is always so level-headed and justice minded. Her solution makes too much sense, and this is a process that I will try in my first grade classroom (in addition to the regular report cards for now). Imagine simply asking parents, what do you want to know?

In the end, we believe that the ultimate goal of this process is to develop something that serves children’s learning and that puts our energies in the right place. One of the biggest stresses of teaching is that you know that there are many things you have to do for your kids, but you are pulled in many different directions. As progressive educators we also try to help others re-imagine what we do as teachers, and grading is a small part of this work, yet the effects are so pervasive.

We feel this is just the beginning of an arduous, but worthwhile task. We are asking that you truly engage in the process for which Living in Dialogue was built as a resource for educators. How are you grappling with grades? What would your perfect educational world look like when it comes to reporting student progress?