A system to tell how your kid is doing in school
This was written by Steve Peha, president of Teaching That Makes Sense, an education consultancy based in Carrboro, N.C. He writes regularly about education policy on the National Journal Education Experts Blog. He is the author of three books: Be a Writer, Be a Better Writer, and Reading Allowed.
By Steve Peha
When I began working in education as a tutor, I thought I’d be working just with kids. But tutoring is a family affair, and part of the work involves tutoring parents, too. Of all the questions they asked, the most common was, “How’s my kid doin’ in school?”
Isn’t this what report cards tell us? Apparently not. Even when kids’ grades improved, parents still wanted to know what their children had learned.
Then state testing began and we had volumes of data about student learning—volumes of data, but little information. We had numbers and