Grade Report To Student: Fill & Download for Free

Worry.Is his parent going to be angry because he didn’t do well on a test.Can I count on the parent to make sure he completes his homework.Why isn’t this student understanding this concept? What strategy might be more effective?How should I word the comments on the grade report to give an accurate picture without discouraging the student?Am I expecting too much from this student?Am I expecting too little?Should I recommend that this student be tested?The list goes on and on. The worry and concern teachers feel for their students would probably surprise many parents.

The selective enrollment high schools are the best high schools in Chicago and, in fact, some of the best high schools in all of Illinois. They’re public schools, but they get to take the “best” students only.I put “best” in quotation marks, because they don’t really take the best of all students … they divide the city into four different socio-economic tiers, and take a certain number of the best students from each tier. It used to be done by race, but they were sued for that, and they changed it to socio-economic class instead. Either way, it’s a form of Affirmative Action that creates impossibly high standards for most students from what the city determines are “affluent” neighborhoods, and sets a really low bar for students from “impoverished” neighborhoods.And people game the system all the time.One year, I had a student who did absolutely no work his 8th grade year. His final grade in my class was 45%. That was one of his highest grades, because I give participation points for group work. We tried to get the administration to hold him back or even expel him, but they wouldn’t. He just sort of … existed … in our classes. He took up space.But your 8th grade report card means nothing to the selective enrollment schools. Admission to those schools is based on your final 7th grade report card, and two tests you take when you are in 8th grade. His 7th grade report card was average, and he did average on the two tests. His work ethic was horrible. He was smart enough. He just didn’t care and had very little parental support at home.The school was in a Tier 4 (most affluent) neighborhood. He went to school there because his mother was living with her wealthier, older boyfriend from the neighborhood. His biological father lived in a Tier 1 (most impoverished) neighborhood.They used his biological father’s address when applying to selective enrollment schools. He got into one of the best schools in Chicago with scores significantly lower than his classmates who actually gave a damn about school. Some of his classmates went to tutoring and busted their asses to get into the best school, and still didn’t get in, because they were honest about living in a Tier 4 neighborhood, and the standards for admission are higher for those students.I had students who wept when they found out they didn’t get into the best schools, and this student didn’t care which school he went to. He didn’t care about much of anything, really, except football and getting dates. His parents did the admissions paperwork for him.He, predictably, did not do well in high school. He had a team of counselors and teachers who bent over backwards to help him, because they so wanted a success story from a kid like him, but it was to no avail. I believe he made it through his sophomore year before finally transferring to an easier, non-selective school.I hate seeing resources wasted on students who don’t care and don’t appreciate them, when there are other students who do their best and still can’t get those resources.

“Mr. Bates, I just don’t care.”A seventh grader (13 years old) told me that while I was working one-on-one with him during my lunch break several years ago.I, like all of his other teachers, decided to do everything we could, including giving up our lunch breaks, to work with this student so he’d do well enough on his report card to get into a good high school.Chicago has a complicated high school placement system, but the gist of it is that you have to do really well on your seventh-grade report card if you want to have any chance of getting into a decent high school two years later. (They can’t use the 8th grade report card, because it comes too late.) If you don’t get into one of the good Chicago magnet high schools, your choices are to go to private school, move to a better school district, or go to the neighborhood high school and pray that you’re the exception, not the norm, when it comes to outcomes from those schools.We knew that this kid’s mother couldn’t afford a private high school for him, and couldn’t move, either. His mother worked for the city, and the law in Chicago is that anyone who works for the city has to live within the city limits. His only hope at a decent life was to make it into one of Chicago Public School’s selective enrollment programs.This student had all of his teachers and his mother doing everything in their power to help him, and it was all for nothing. He genuinely didn’t care. He didn’t care about wasting people’s time. He didn’t care about his grades. He didn’t care about his future, beyond what video game he was going to play when he got home from school that day.We never gave up on him, but he gave up on himself. The last I heard, he got into a private high school on a needs-based scholarship, was kicked out after his freshman year due to low grades, ended up at the local public high school, and had several drug-related run-ins with the law. I ran into his mother at the grocery store about two years ago, and she said that she never knew what he was doing during the day, or when he’d come home at night. She only knew that he quit going to school altogether… the school told her that… and that some nights he’d come home and sleep in his room, and other nights he wouldn’t.What I learned from that student, and similar students I’ve taught since then, is that you can’t help people who don’t want to help themselves. If you have limited time and effort and too many people who need it, you’re better off focusing your time and effort on the people who actually want it.