What the 1, 2, 3 and 4 marks on an SFUSD report card mean
Updated
An SFUSD elementary report card does not give letter grades. Each standard gets a mark from 1 to 4, and every one of those marks answers the same question: how far along is this child toward what the district expects by the end of the school year? The year ends in late May. A card that comes home in November is measuring against a finish line that is still six months away.
The scale, in the district's words
The legend is printed on the first page of every card. The middle column below is that wording, verbatim. The right column is how Toward June explains it to a parent.
| Mark | What the card says | What it means for a parent |
|---|---|---|
| 4 | Exceeds end-of-year standard | Applying it beyond what was taught |
| 3 | Meets end-of-year standard | On track for June |
| 2 | Approaching end-of-year standard | Progressing toward June; common in T1 and T2 |
| 1 | Not yet approaching end-of-year standard | Beginning steps toward June; common in T1 and T2 |
| / | Not assessed this period | The teacher did not assess this standard this trimester |
The slash is not a mark. It means the teacher did not assess that standard during this trimester, usually because it had not been taught yet. It says nothing about how the child is doing.
Every mark points at June
This is the part that trips up parents who grew up with A through F. A traditional grade asks “how did you do on what we covered?” An SFUSD mark asks “how close are you to where the standard says you should be when the year ends?” The target does not move as the year goes on. The child does.
So a 3 on the first-trimester card means the child has already met the end-of-year standard, with two trimesters still to go. That is a real achievement, and it is also why a 3 is not the expected mark in the fall.
A 2 in the fall is not a bad mark
Read against the scale, a 2 says the child is approaching the end-of-year standard. In the first and second trimesters that is where much of the class is meant to be: the skill has been introduced, it is being practised, and it is not yet secure. A 1 says the same thing from a step further back. Neither is a verdict on the child. Both describe where the work is right now.
The useful question about a 2 is not “is this bad?” It is “which standard, and what does the standard actually say?” The card lists each one in plain language, such as “Compares and contrasts two or more versions of the same story or topic.” That sentence is something a parent can do at a kitchen table. A number is not.
What the marks are not for
Because the marks are numbers, it is tempting to do arithmetic on them. Resist it. The scale is ordinal, not a score, and the district does not combine marks into a total.
- Do not average them. A 4 in “Works/plays collaboratively with others” and a 2 in multi-step problems do not make a 3 in anything.
- Do not read a GPA into them. There is no GPA on an elementary card, and nothing on it converts to one.
- Do not compare across children. The mark measures one child against one standard. A sibling or a classmate is not part of the measurement.
- Do not draw a line through them. A 3, then a 2, then a 3 on the same standard across a year is three separate observations by a teacher. It is not a trend, and it is not a decline.
Other 1 to 4 scales on the same card
Two other documents a family may receive also use 1 to 4, and they mean different things. The Star Reading and Star Math results from the district assessment report use levels labelled Exceeds, Meets, Approaching and Not Yet Approaching. The ELPAC, for children learning English, uses levels from Beginning stage to Well developed. A Star 3 is not “on track for June”; it is a level on a different instrument. Toward June labels each scale by the document it came from for exactly this reason.
How to read the Star results covers the assessment report on its own.
Where this comes from
The mark wording is taken from the legend printed on page one of the SFUSD elementary report card. The district publishes sample cards for every grade at sfusd.edu/ReportCards. If the paper in your hand and this page disagree, the paper wins, and we would like to hear about it.