Grading

I agree with the points that Alfie Kohn made about grading in his article. Three years ago the school I work at moved to a standards based report card system. It is still a work in process because often times parents, students, and even teachers are only familiar with the more traditional A-F grading system. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the standards based grading system, it uses a number scale from 1-4 to rank students' achievement in specific areas which they are supposed to know by the end of the year, depending on what grade they are in. There are still  a few "bugs" to work out but overall I feel like it is a better assessment of actual student achievement without labeling or sorting students based on letter grades like Kohn had mentioned.   Using this type of grading method can even help motivate students to do better or more thorough work because they do not feel pressured to get an "A." I also think it is important to always include teacher comments on any type of grade report, but obviously with this type of assessment parents will have a lot of questions, especially if they have never seen it before.