Parents review schools: School Ratings & Reviews for Public & Private Schools: GreatSchools

Parent’s guide to finding the right school

Finding the right school for your child can be a daunting task. One family may want small class sizes and strong test scores while another places a high priority on arts and science programs. Others may prefer bilingual — or even trilingual — schools to gain a linguistic advantage or simply so their kids can talk to abuela or po po.

Four families throughout California shared the lessons learned from their journeys in search of the right public school for their children. Sometimes they had to let go of their top choice. Sometimes they had to endure several rounds of enrollment. Other times, they were surprised to find that the best fit turned out to be their neighborhood school.

There are lots of popular online school comparison tools to check out like GreatSchools.org. And California public schools produce report cards each year showing how many teachers are credentialed, average staff salaries, student achievement scores, suspension rates and the general condition of the school’s facilities. But there’s nothing like visiting a school, talking to teachers and other parents to find out if it’s an environment that will foster your child’s love of learning.

While parents keep searching, school comparisons will soon be changing in California. This year, the state will redesign its system for evaluating public school performance to include more than just test scores. Gone is the three-digit Academic Performance Index based solely on math and English test results crafted during the No Child Left Behind era. The State Board of Education is looking at graduation rates, how fast English learners gain proficiency and other indicators to comply with a new federal law.

What that new system will look like (one mockup uses a color spectrum of red to blue to indicate improvement) and whether schools will even be ranked remains fuzzy and politically charged. Teacher unions are concerned that evaluating a school based on test scores will lead to a slippery slope for teacher evaluations. And civil justice groups want to include measures of school climate in an effort to drive down suspension and expulsion rates that have been linked to the school-to-prison pipeline.

Ultimately, Fresno Unified School District Superintendent Mike Hanson says even if parents don’t get one number, they are sophisticated enough to find the things that are important to them. Fresno is among a group of urban school districts known as CORE districts pushing the envelope on measuring social-emotional growth, which can include how students handle conflict and manage their emotions.

“Every kid is different. Parents know that very very well. And they look for different things in different schools for different kids,” Hanson said. “We all have a great deal of choice in our districts because parents want to have it.”

Neighborhood schools can be wonderful 

Mahasin Abuwi Aleem and E. Harith Aleem of Oakland

Children: Aadam, 9; Isa, 6; Aasiya, 18 months.

Hometown: Oakland, Lake Merritt

School: Cleveland Elementary School

Priorities: Diversity, test scores, curriculum and veteran teachers

Experience: Despite tirelessly researching and enrolling what she thought were the best schools to fit her sons’ personalities, Aleem found structure and support just blocks away in her neighborhood school.

Advice: Use online search tools, ask friends and acquaintances, and consider the family’s budget.

“We’re priced out of Oakland,” Aleem said. “Potentially it would just make more sense to go somewhere a little bit cheaper where the incomes aren’t significantly less, which we think is the Sacramento area.”

Mahasin Abuwi Aleem, 36, and E. Harith Aleem, 40, with their children Aadam, Isa and Aasiya. Photo courtesy of the Aleems.

Mahasin Abuwi Aleem, a graduate student, and her husband, a parks and recreation supervisor, conducted extensive research in Oakland for their sons, 9-year-old Aadam now in third grade and 6-year-old Isa in first grade. They also have a 14-month-old girl Aasiya.

Instead of settling for their neighborhood school, she sent Aadam to a Waldorf-inspired charter school for creative learning and Isa to a Spanish dual-immersion program to foster his quick grasp of language. But the charter school was brand new and Isa’s teachers sent him home with a note for chewing pencils rather than finding out if he was intimidated or bored.

Both ended up at Cleveland Elementary School, their neighborhood school, where they are thriving.

“We enrolled in our neighborhood public school and it was wonderful,” Aleem said. “It’s like four blocks from where we live, it’s really diverse, the kids for the most part are well behaved, veteran teachers and the parent population is very kind.”

The bilingual edge

Jen and Joe Ward of Los Angeles

Children: Audrey 8; Olivia, 6

School: Aldama Elementary School

Hometown: Los Angeles, Highland Park

Priorities: Community, bilingual education, parent engagement

Experience: The Wards let go of their top choice school and followed their instincts for a bilingual school with an inviting community feel.

Advice: Visit schools and do your research but follow your gut and don’t overthink.

“I got overwhelmed with excitement and got carried away,” said Jen Ward.

Jen Ward, 41, and Joe Ward, 42, with their daughters Audrey and Olivia. Photo courtesy of Sari Makki-Phillips.

In Southern California, high test scores weren’t as important to Jen Ward as following her instinct for an inviting community and a desire for her oldest daughter, Audrey, to learn Spanish. The family in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Highland Park toured a mix of charter and neighborhood schools and was placed on a waitlist for their top pick. When school started, Ward started Audrey at a school with strong test scores but quickly realized it lacked warmth.

During the first week, Ward received a call from Aldama Elementary School notifying her of an opening. She learned how the students spend half the day in English and half in Spanish. She was especially pleased to see how teachers went after grants for cognitive math instruction for their students.

“I went down the street. It was just love. I pulled Audrey out immediately,” Ward, 41, said. “Two weeks later I got the call that I had gotten into the school I wanted and I turned it down.”

Audrey’s younger sister, Olivia, is now at Aldama too.

Higher expectations for Latinos and African-Americans

Luis Sanchez and Maria Brenes of Los Angeles

Children: Emiliano, 5; Alegria, 3

School: Arroyo Seco Museum Science Magnet School

Hometown: Los Angeles, El Sereno

Priorities: Elementary and middle school, culture of higher expectations for African Americans and Latinos, positive discipline and school climate

Experience: A social equity advocate, Sanchez wanted a place where his son would be instilled with an expectation to attend college. After touring charter, magnet and traditional schools, they went with a K-8 program so Emiliano wouldn’t have to change schools in middle school.

Advice: Get recommendations from friends and coworkers, visit schools.

“The belief system you put out there and the belief system teachers have are critical to building the confidence of young people at a young age,” said Sanchez.

Luis Sanchez, 41, and Maria Brenes, 39, with their children, Emiliano and Alegria, and Chewbacca. Photo courtesy of Luis Sanchez.

But Aldama was cut from Luis Sanchez’s list when he and his wife, Maria, scouted schools for their 5-year-old son Emilino. Even though the dual language program was attractive, they felt the neighborhood had been gentrifying and wasn’t sure their son’s needs would be a priority.

Sanchez, 41, a social equity advocate who works with the Alliance for Boys and Men of Color, applied and enrolled Emilino in kindergarten at Arroyo Seco Museum Science Magnet School in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Highland Park. The magnet school with 92 percent Latino students and 82 percent qualifying for free or reduced priced meals was on their short list because the K-8 school will allow Emilino to stay in one school longer.

“It was more of a seamless transition that didn’t require us to figure out a middle school option. In my view, it’s truly hard to find a middle school in LAUSD,” said Sanchez, who drives five miles from their home in El Sereno to drop off Emilino.

They knew friends and colleagues who sent their children to Arroyo Seco. They felt it had a strong school culture that would teach their son about conflict resolution as a young Latino. The school was ranked 9 out of 10 under the Academic Performance Index in 2013. Under the first year of the California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress test using Common Core learning, 40 percent of students met math proficiency and 50 percent met English proficiency.

Sanchez said it’s imperative that schools instill a higher expectation of learning from African American and Latino students.

“School culture and school climate is critical to me,” Sanchez said. “Part of it is how schools navigate kids of color … in terms of how they treat conflict and handle the energy (of students). It’s interesting because my life is reflective of the work I’m advocating on.”

Persistence pays off

Heather Barrett and Johan Almqvist of San Francisco

Children: Olivia, 7; Magnus, 2

Hometown: San Francisco, Richmond District

School: George Peabody Elementary

Priorities: Skilled teachers, supportive community, test scores, late school start time

Experience: Barrett and Almqvist rolled the dice on San Francisco’s angst-inducing enrollment process and have come to praise their daughter’s teachers for helping Olivia to excel academically.

Advice: Get recommendations from friends and acquaintances, stay determined through the enrollment process and trust teachers.

“Teachers are incredibly smart,” said Barrett. “Not that they weren’t when I was growing up but I feel they’re teaching at a higher level. Their game is stronger now and our kid has benefited enormously.”

Olivia Almqvist, 7, attends George Peabody Elementary in San Francisco. Photo courtesy of Heather Barrett.

In Northern California, San Francisco’s enrollment process has instilled terror in many parents — so much so that wealthy families have been known to move or send their children to private school.

Heather Barrett, a strategy director in the advertising industry, and her husband Johan Almqvist, an international sales director in the publishing industry, credit persistence and determination for getting their 7-year-old daughter, Olivia, into George Peabody Elementary in San Francisco’s Inner Richmond neighborhood.

The district has a goal of integrating students of different race and socioeconomic backgrounds, but Barrett says it does so without considering the families. Parents identify their preferred schools but the district also factors in demographic information such as the mother’s educational attainment in assigning a school. A student could be assigned to a school miles away from home or to one that is underperforming. In Olivia’s case, Barrett and her husband went through three rounds of the application process just for kindergarten.

“There is something going on that is incredibly opaque where the system appears to force school choices without thought about commute,” Barrett said. “So there’s an incredible amount of angst when your child turns 5.”

Still, Barrett said she has been impressed with her daughter’s teachers and appreciates being in a community with resources to support teachers. In turn, the teachers have helped Olivia surpass her parents’ expectations, particularly as California schools adapt to new Common Core curriculum that emphasizes getting students ready for four-year college programs or ready for the workforce by the time they graduate high school.

“The quality of the teaching is so strong, it defied my mental concept of what was possible,” Barrett said.

Picking a school – Tell us your priorities

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Parents’ school reviews correlated with test scores and demographics, not school effectiveness

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain

A first-of-its-kind analysis of parents’ reviews of U.S. public K-12 schools, posted primarily from 2009 to 2019 on the popular school information site GreatSchools. org, found that most reviews were written by parents at schools in affluent neighborhoods and provided information that correlated strongly with test scores, a measure that closely tracks race and family income. Language associated with school effectiveness, which measures how much students improve in their test scores over time and is less correlated with demographics, was much less used. The research was published today in AERA Open, a peer-reviewed, open access journal of the American Educational Research Association.

“Our results reveal the large weight that parents in this timeframe placed on test scores as a measure of quality,” said study coauthor Nabeel Gillani, a doctoral student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Parents seemed to value schools based on current students’ performance, not growth over time, which perhaps reflects the longstanding focus of education policies on test scores as a primary marker of school quality. ”

“School rating websites have come under scrutiny for ratings systems that overemphasize test scores,” said Gillani. “Now we’ve found that subjective online parent reviews can do the same.”

“Further research is needed to understand whether reviews reflecting school demographics have the potential to exacerbate neighborhood segregation or other conditions that impact access to high-quality education,” Gillani said.

For their study, Gillani and his coauthors, Eric Chu, Doug Beeferman, and Deb Roy, also at MIT, and Rebecca Eynon, at the University of Oxford, applied recent advances in natural language processing to analyze about 830,000 reviews of more than 110,000 schools that were posted by self-identified parents primarily from 2009 to 2019 on GreatSchools.org. Their analyses identified and measured the prevalence of words and phrases that correlated with different measures of school quality—namely, test scores and student learning progress measures—along with school demographics like race and family income, drawn from the Stanford Education Data Archive.

Schools in urban areas and those serving affluent families were found to be more likely to receive parent reviews, and there were clear differences in the review language used by parents of children at majority-White vs. minority-White, and high-income vs. low-income schools.

The authors found that many of the words and phrases that were statistically associated with test scores also conveyed information about the racial and income makeup of schools. For example, words like “PTA” and “emails” were more often used in descriptions of schools with smaller percentages of students receiving free or reduced-price lunch and those serving a smaller percentage of non-White students, as were reviews using the terms “small school,” “special needs,” and “IEP” (Individualized Education Plan).

“Overall, parents’ reviews tended to focus on topics that are associated with race and income in school systems,” said Roy, who directs MIT’s Center for Constructive Communication. “Wording such as ‘the PTA,’ ’emails,’ ‘private school,’ ‘we,’ and ‘us’ are predictive of test scores, reflecting the tendency of more affluent, non-minority parents to have dual-parent households, digital connectivity, more schooling options, and more time to be involved and communicate regularly with teachers.”

“These results reveal the subtle and sometimes hidden patterns in the words we use, sending signals and encoding biases that pervade our social realities,” Roy said. “New techniques from machine learning applied to large data sets describing human behavior can help make those patterns visible.”

The findings offer evidence that parents from lower-income, minority schools may have fewer voices to learn from.

“Unfortunately, many of these parents are not always tapped into social networks where they can readily receive guidance that helps them identify and select the best schools for their children,” said Gillani.

According to the authors, rating sites should encourage parents and stakeholders to value growth as a measure of school quality. They should also adopt strategies to capture a more inclusive cross-section of parents’ perspectives about schools and prompt insights that reflect how well schools help children learn and grow.

The analysis does not explore how parent reviews may have changed as a result of GreatSchools’ methodological changes in recent years. GreatSchools updated its rating system in 2017 to include new measures of school quality and again in September 2020, after the study was conducted, to emphasize educational equity and give more weight to student growth. GreatSchools and MIT are pursuing a data and research partnership to continue examining how its site is being used and to explore modifications to mitigate potential inequity issues.

“It is critical to uplift the voices of all parents, especially those in traditionally underserved communities, to highlight their experiences within a school community,” said GreatSchools CEO Jon Deane. “As we continue to evolve measures of school quality, including prioritizing academic growth over test scores, we value working alongside researchers to find new ways to more equitably serve all parents. ”

The authors suggest that parents and the public be mindful of how much weight to place on subjective assessments offered by other parents about any given school—and to be mindful of how ratings sites may factor these subjective assessments into their overall scores for schools. (GreatSchools does not factor subjective assessments into its overall ratings.) The authors also recommend that school administrators foster a culture where all parents’ voices are valued and parents are encouraged to share their holistic views about the quality of education their children receive.

“One of the goals of school rating sites is to use available data to democratize access to information about school quality,” said Gillani. “However, the school choice market is only as good as the information available to consumers. We need more representative voices talking about a more holistic set of topics if we want to maximize opportunities and outcomes for all students, especially those from less privileged backgrounds. ”

More information:
Nabeel Gillani et al, Parents’ Online School Reviews Reflect Several Racial and Socioeconomic Disparities in K–12 Education, AERA Open (2021). DOI: 10.1177/2332858421992344

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“Don’t put a deuce, my mother will kill me.

” Why kids are afraid of bad grades

“Checking grades is sacred”

For some parents, a digital diary is nothing more than a convenient way to check the schedule and check homework. For others, it is constant monitoring of the child’s progress and stress due to poor grades. As Nadezhda K., a Muscovite, told Gazeta.Ru, she constantly logs into her electronic diary, especially if the child has tests that day. “I keep track of my progress, and I always get upset because of bad grades. The most difficult thing is to hold back in the evening and not tell the child your “fi” about the triple in mathematics,” she admits.

Anna M., mother of a third-grade student, logs into MES (Moscow Electronic Diary) several times a day.

“Checking grades is sacred. I understand that seeing good grades there, I satisfy my ego, she says. – But I don’t scold the child for bad grades, if a three is put, then a three. I rather don’t like the mark “4” – usually it’s inattention, inaccuracy. ”

According to a Muscovite, there is a significant disadvantage in electronic diaries. “Often the system “hangs”, and then the children get their grades lowered for failing to pass the test – this is unpleasant. Recently, there was a test in which the whole family participated: there were disputes and guesses as to what was right… But the test contained certain answers that did not fit with the child’s life reasoning, this is a minus of tests and the inability to give the child reason, ”says Anna.

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Iraida Chaikina, the grandmother of an elementary school student, enters the electronic diary to look at her homework, and if she sees bad grades, she never scolds her granddaughter. “I raised my daughter, and I understand how many mistakes I made then, painfully reacting to bad grades. Therefore, I behave differently with my granddaughter, ”she admits. The woman urges parents not to scold children for grades in order to avoid resentment in the future. “I’m begging moms – don’t overreact. Control is needed, but without tantrums. You can say everything and understand where and what was missed, ”concludes Iraida Chaikina.

What do teachers think?

Not only children, but also teachers get bad grades: they have to communicate with their parents almost every day because of “unfair” grades.

“I had one student whose mother took screenshots with grades that seemed unfair to her and sent them to the head teacher of the school. I had to explain myself for each mark of the child, ”says Tatyana Loshmanova, Master of Pedagogy, elementary school teacher.

According to the teacher, today there are very strict standards for grading, and the teacher, with all the desire, cannot give a high score if there are errors, shortcomings or blots in the work. “For example, in elementary school there is the concept of “formulating a task”. And if the student missed one of the mandatory items, the grade will be lowered.” But parents do not understand this, and teachers often have to explain why the child has a “4” and not an “5,” she explains.

At the same time, the student may use a trick to show his parents that he was treated with prejudice.

According to the teacher, today almost all primary school students write with erasable ink pens, and in her practice there are often cases when a child “erases” mistakes and shows parents the corrected work.

“But the grade has already been given, and it’s not a five. As a result, parents think that the teacher is biased,” says Tatiana Loshmanova.

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Children go for such tricks because of the pressure of their parents, the teacher believes. She notes that she always tries to convey to children that they study for the sake of knowledge, and not for the sake of grades. But over the years of work at the school, many parents have passed through it, acutely reacting to the poor grades of their children. “There was one girl who said so: “Don’t put a bad mark, my mother will kill me,” recalls Tatyana Loshmanova. “According to her, even today there are children who themselves tear out pages from notebooks in order to copy without errors. “But they do it not because they need it, but because they are afraid of the wrath of their parents,” she explains.

All this affects the progress of children. The teacher admits that she often has to deal with situations when parents shift their ambitions onto children. From childhood, a child is taught that he is the best, which means that he should answer and write control tests best of all. Such children, having received a bad mark, begin to cry and ask to rewrite the work.

“The child does not want to rewrite anything, but is terribly afraid that due to a bad grade he will no longer be the best for his mother,” says the teacher.

Moscow school teacher Anastasia Shalaeva believes that pressure on children due to academic performance can cause serious harm to the child’s psyche. “It turns out that the child is attacked from two sides. On the one hand, there is a school where he comes and they tell him – study, on the other – his parents, who scold and criticize instead of support. The child suffers, feels bad, and no one seems to love him,” she explains.

At the same time, grades are far from always an indicator of the level of a child’s knowledge, Shalaeva is sure – she knows in practice that there are children who consistently write dictations poorly, but at the same time they do certain exercises well, so in a five-point system, the score is no more than than a convention.

“It is very difficult to show with grades whether a student has become better at understanding a subject or not. Maybe he always wrote dictations and made 20 mistakes. And he wrote another dictation with 10 mistakes. It’s still a deuce, but these are completely different deuces, ”explains Shalaeva.

In such a situation, she advises to talk to the child and praise him for his efforts. “Yes, he still has a bad grade, but there are much fewer mistakes, and this is already a success. It is a pity that parents do not notice the improvement, but only see a deuce, ”complains Anastasia Shalaeva.

She advises parents to stop tugging at their children because of grades, then the child will not be nervous, and probably will become better at school. “When he gets nervous and thinks about a mark, his thoughts are not on the topic that he should answer, but on the fact that he should get a good mark for his mother,” she explains.

What do psychologists advise?

“Pressure due to grades from parents creates hatred for school in children and discourages the desire to study in the future,” says Natalia Derbeneva, a practicing psychologist and co-founder of the Infant School kindergarten. “It turns out that parents have been communicating with the child through the prism of evaluations for ten years, and this communication is often negative,” she explains.

In addition, the child may stop believing in his parents. “If you are scolded so much because of the grade, then all the beautiful words that “we learn not for grades, but for knowledge” are worth nothing,” she concludes.

According to psychotherapist Artem Tolokonin, the “struggle” for good grades often hides the desire of adults to be the parents of an exceptional, outstanding and successful child. He is sure that by their neurosis, parents develop neurosis in their children, driving them into the framework of ideal learning and behavior.

“The super-valuable idea that “the child should be the best of all” is put at the forefront. Often, at any cost. And the bargaining chip, as a rule, is the happiness of the child. I often have “excellent students” at receptions, who in childhood were physically punished for “fours”. This has sad consequences for the psyche, which already affect the life of an adult, ”says the doctor.

The psychotherapist explains: when scolding for poor grades in exact subjects, parents do not think about the individual characteristics of the child at all. It implies that a child may have completely different inclinations and character traits.

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“To demand good academic performance in exact subjects from a creative and humanistically inclined child means to increase the risk of his unfulfillment in the future. Without developing his creativity, he will simply go the wrong way and will not be able to become happy in the full sense of the word, ”he explains.

Natalia Derbeneva recommends especially nervous parents to seek professional help from a psychologist and set rules for themselves on how to communicate with their child about grades.

“You can never pass judgment on a situation yourself. It is necessary to give the child the opportunity to build a causal relationship with the help of questions: how do you score, why is the score low, what do you plan to do? And, thus, shift the focus from their perception to how the child evaluates each assessment received, ”she explains.

The psychologist is sure that when it comes to education, parents should be “managers” who connect the necessary resources in time and keep track of who should do what. “This is both talk and a plan of action. Not always children can cope on their own, sometimes the help of tutors is needed, ”she explains.

Education is an independent process that parents should help and encourage. But not by hypercontrol, but by assistance, help and suggestion that, regardless of the assessments, the child is loved and supported, Artem Tolokonin is sure. “The main thing in childhood is a feeling of happiness, and it has nothing to do with marks,” he concludes.

Out of weight classes: why parents oppose new grading systems | Articles

In the Kaluga region, parents opposed the introduction of a new grading system – the weighted average. Unlike the usual arithmetic mean system, this approach takes into account not only the assessment itself, but also the so-called weight of a particular type of work. What is such a system, which, however, has been introduced in other Russian schools for several years, as well as how parents can influence the criteria for evaluating their children – in the Izvestia material.

Parents against innovations

In the Kaluga region, a dispute broke out over the introduction of a new grading system in one of the schools in the city of Maloyaroslavets. Members of the public organization “Parental movement. Kaluga Region”, namely the parents of students of the Maloyaroslavets School No. 1, advocated the abolition of the weighted average grading system. They created a petition saying that “this system is not optimal for an objective assessment of the knowledge gained, but is just another stress factor for the fragile psyche of school-age children. ”

According to the parent community, the usual arithmetic mean method is more universal and objective than the weighted average.

– With the weighted average system, the computer puts out the assessment, and each assessment has its own “weight category”. For example, a test score is three points, independent work is two points, homework or the answer at the blackboard is one point. Thus, if a student wrote a test for a triple or a deuce at the end of a quarter, he will no longer have time and opportunity to correct this assessment, because it will be necessary to correct not one triple, but as many as three triples or deuces, – indicated in the text.

Photo: TASS/Vyacheslav Prokofiev

According to the petition, the decision to change the system of knowledge assessment was made without the consent of parents and students and “the decision was made without any reasoned justification for the expediency of this methodology.”

However, according to parents, Article 2 of the Federal Law “On Education in the Russian Federation” states that students and parents are the most important participants in educational relations (paragraph 31). Article 3, paragraph 10 guarantees “the democratic nature of education management, ensuring the rights of teachers, students, parents (legal representatives) of minor students to participate in the management of educational organizations.”

Introduced in other regions as well

As Izvestia was informed by the Ministry of Education of the Kaluga Region, the introduction of this assessment system was initiated not by the department itself, but by the school administration. “They have decided to switch to a weighted average system. Some group of parents suggested not to switch to it, opposed, recorded a video. We saw all this and asked the school management to once again enter into a dialogue with parents, ”the ministry noted.

Photo: RIA Novosti/Grigory Sysoev

– As for the most average weighted system – this is the usual five-point system, just each type of work has its own specific weight – coefficient. It is also used in other regions of Russia, in particular, in some Moscow schools. What is the point: depending on the complexity of the work, coefficients are set – 1, 2, 3, 4 … For example, a student received a five, and this five is multiplied by this coefficient. For example, he received the following mark for an oral answer, for example, a four. But the oral answer has a lower coefficient – 3. The scores are multiplied by the coefficients, added up and then divided by the sum of these coefficients – an average score is obtained. This is just one of the options for how this can take place, – told Izvestia in the department. – In some schools, the electronic journal calculates grades automatically, it has this gradation.

Possibly later

Izvestiya was informed at Maloyaroslavets School No. 1 itself that the school only planned to switch to this system from the beginning of the school year. According to the regulation adopted at the school back in August on the procedure for current monitoring of progress and intermediate certification of students, it was planned to make the calculation of the weighted average grade automatic in the electronic diary. However, now the implementation of this plan has been suspended after the appeal of disgruntled parents.

Photo: TASS/Dmitry Feoktistov

— The minority defeated the majority. The entire teaching staff, the school administration and the majority of children interested in the quality of knowledge and results agreed with the introduction of this system. In addition, now we accept the claims of parents that they are against the fact that we abandoned this system, because it suited them just the same. We have not conducted any experiments, this system is already being implemented in many Russian schools, we consulted before making a decision on its introduction, – Izvestia was told at the Maloyaroslavets school. – For the time being, this implementation is on hold and we are reverting to the old system. We will work on it, and there is a possibility that maybe we will return to it next year if it gets proper recognition.

Decided locally

From a mathematical point of view, the weighted average grading system is more objective than the traditional one, because the grades, for example, for a test paper or the final annual exam theoretically have different weights, considers a member of the Council for General Education and Additional Education of Children of the Committee on Education and science of the State Duma Konstantin Derevyanko.

— Nevertheless, the key question is how to determine the weight of a particular learning activity. Today this is regulated by local acts, that is, at the level of regions or individual schools. There are no unified approaches to this issue yet. The system is mobile, developing and requires more clarifications and improvements, – he said in a conversation with Izvestia. “However, in order for it to become objective and be able to prevent any conflicts that arise due to the fact that, for example, parents are dissatisfied with the final grades due to disagreement with the system for distributing these coefficients, it is necessary to conduct a comprehensive analysis and develop common standards.

Photo: RIA Novosti/Konstantin Chalabov

Each school, within the framework of the current legislation, has the right, in agreement with the participants in the educational process, to decide on which system to evaluate students and whether to do it at all, points out in an interview with Izvestia, the chairman of the Association of Young Teachers of Russia, director of Lyceum No. 369 Konstantin Tkhostov. “Now, for example, the topic of introducing such subjects as fine arts, technology, physical education, and music into the credit system is also being actively discussed. The fact is that these items sometimes raise questions among children and parents, because by and large they are needed for emotional unloading, and when an additional load begins on a child who is already busy in all areas, this is not entirely correct, notes Tkhostov,

— By and large, what the assessment system will be like is an agreement between a separate school and parents for the benefit of those who study there. However, before introducing anything, it is necessary to negotiate with the participants in the educational process, while not forgetting the main experts in the education system, which include the students themselves, , he believes. – In any case, it must be fixed locally. In our educational institution, for example, the grade is displayed by the program itself, which is called the “Electronic Diary”: the child sees his quarter grade in the course of obtaining his current grades, and there are no difficulties or problems in this.