Ed Source – Jane Meredith Adams
“Nine mothers from Burma flipped open manila file folders in Room 210 in Oakland’s Garfield Elementary School and looked at information that was as foreign as it was compelling – a chart comparing their child’s progress in reading to that of their unidentified classmates and grade-level standards. The data appeared in the universal language of bar graphs and the mothers, who are Karen-speaking refugees with little formal education, each saw at a glance how far her child has come and how much more there is to be to learned before the end of the school year. It is the kind of real-time comparative data that most teachers don’t reveal to families, and it is the core of an approach called Academic Parent-Teacher Teams, which is taught by the San Francisco-based research group WestEd. In addition to Garfield Elementary, the program is operating at schools in the Sacramento, Stockton and San Juan Unified districts and 300 schools nationwide. The idea is to share ongoing math and reading scores in a way that emphasizes progress, doesn’t embarrass families and creates a parent-school relationship that is based on the obvious but often overlooked common ground of how a child is doing in class.”(more)