In December, Learning Heroes released a new report: Parents 2018: Going Beyond Good Grades, which aims to provide educators with insights into what parents believe about their children’s progress and success in school.

During last month’s unofficial launch of the report, Springpoint’s Executive Director Elina Alayeva and Senior Director Victoria Crispin, joined a discussion with leading thinkers, funders, educators, and parents to delve into the report’s findings. The report demonstrates the need for clarity on how student effort differs from student performance, progress, and, ultimately, college and career readiness. It underscores a need for more transparency and a set of mechanisms that can provide clear information such as parent-teacher conferencing, assessment reporting, and teacher training around authentically communicating student performance. Reflecting on these needs, Elina and Victoria noted that strong mastery-based learning systems emphasize and potentially solve for these barriers.

Our leaders were struck by “the disconnect,” which refers to the difference between parents’ perception of performance and achievement versus their child’s reality. The report shows that nearly 9 in 10 parents believe their child is performing at or above grade level whereas only about one-third of students nationally are actually on grade level. Our team reflected on the fact that report cards do not often provide enough nuance or transparency to give parents the information they need. Not only do report cards often act as the primary or sole source of information parents receive about their children’s progress but report cards are universal documents that carry weight and authority with parents in most communities across the country.

Among the rich tapestry of topics, the group also touched on parent-teacher conferences, including the relationship and trust building that must be inherent in conversations about student progress. But how does this happen on the ground, in classrooms and schools between parents and school staff? Interesting ideas surfaced throughout the session. Our leaders were most struck by talk of conversation protocols that can destabilize power dynamics in a discussion, such as restorative circles or Socratic seminars. We are exploring ways to weave these ideas into our community-based design process, which you can read more about in our design guide.

Another striking data point in the report card section asks what parents and teachers believe is most important element for understanding achievement. While the entire section is worth a read, the fact that only 5.9% of teachers believe that what a child tells a parent about school is an important behavior in understanding achievement is worth noting. Here again, we see opportunities to connect mastery and point to its inherent qualities as a solution since mastery provides a critical level of transparency for a student to understand their own progress and take charge of their learning. Further, elevating student voice is a key lever of both mastery and positive youth development theory, which we see as critical to student achievement.

We are excited to see how practitioners engage with and actualize the findings in this report. Its valuable and wide-ranging implications include lessons and suggestions for school designers across the country.