Based on educational research, agencies that oversee education on a state level (Illinois State Board of Education) and federal level (United States Department of Education) create dozens of learning standards for each grade level across all subject areas. These are essentially what a child should know and be able to do by the time they complete that grade level so that they can continue to move forward on a trajectory that will enable them to be college or career ready by the time they graduate high school.

As an example, one of the many learning standards for English language arts (ELA) for kindergarteners in the area of writing is that they are able to use a combination of drawing, dictating, and writing to compose informative/explanatory texts in which they name what they are writing about and supply some information about the topic. Meanwhile for 8th graders, a similar ELA example is that they are able to write informative/explanatory texts to examine a topic and convey ideas, concepts, and information through the selection, organization, and analysis of relevant content. Each grade level in between has standards that are a step up from the grade level prior so that there is a clear path to successful growth from kindergarten to 8th grade. This continues on at the high school level.

In standards-based grading, teachers measure evidence from each student’s work to that point in the school year against their grade level learning standards and determine whether they are showing limited progress (LP), are on their way in progressing (P) toward, meeting (M), or exceeding (E) each individual standard, and then assign one of these four levels to each standard for each student. This is a much more detailed and truer evaluation of student growth than simply assigning a letter grade in each subject for students. CCSD93’s amazing educators work tremendously hard to accurately evaluate each student and represent their progress using this method.

Before the 2021-22 school year, CCSD93 migrated its student information system to TeacherEase because it was built specifically to convey standards-based grading. It is where parents log in to see their child’s progress and report cards. It has robust features to help parents understand their child’s progress. While parents can log into their website from a desktop or mobile device, we highly recommend using the user-friendly TeacherEase app by searching TeacherEase in your app store. When logging in, parents will use the same credential created when registering their child through TeacherEase for the school year. 

View this tutorial video for more on understanding how standards-based grades are represented in TeacherEase. The link is set to start at the grading portion of the video.

When reviewing 1st or 2nd trimester report cards, parents should bear in mind that students are being assessed against end of year standards. The first two report cards of the year are a snapshot of their child’s progress, and students are generally not expected to be meeting (M) or exceeding (E) standards in most cases prior to the 3rd trimester.