Report Cards Give Up A’s and B’s for 4s and 3s Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times

PELHAM, N.Y. — There is no more A for effort at Prospect Hill Elementary School. Skip to next paragraph Enlarge This Image Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times

In fact, there are no more A’s at all. Instead of letter grades in English or math, schoolchildren in this well-to-do Westchester suburb now get report cards filled with numbers indicating how they are faring on dozens of specific skills like “decoding strategies” and “number sense and operations.” The lowest mark, 1, indicates a student is not meeting New York State’s academic standards, while the top grade of 4 celebrates “meeting standards with distinction.”

They are called standards-based report cards, part of a new system flourishing around the country as the latest frontier in a 20-year push to establish rigorous academic standards and require state tests on the material.

Educators praise them for setting clear expectations, but many parents who chose to live in Pelham because of its well-regarded schools find them confusing or worse. Among their complaints are that since the new grades are based on year-end expectations, 4s are generally not available until the final marking period (school officials are planning to tweak this aspect next year).

“We’re running around the school saying ‘2 is cool,’ ” said Jennifer Lapey, a parent who grew up in Pelham, “but in my world, 2 out of 4 is not so cool.”

When Pelham changed from traditional report cards to standards-based ones in its four elementary schools in September, it joined a growing number of districts locally and nationally, including Yonkers, Nashville, Denver and San Diego. (Some New York City schools have also adopted the new cards, at the discretion of their principals.)

While urban areas typically have adopted the system as part of an effort to raise standardized test scores and achievement in struggling schools, officials in top suburban districts like Pelham — where more than 85 percent of students pass state tests — say they are hoping the numbers ensure more consistent grading across classrooms, tamp down grade inflation and refine focus on individual academic skills.

Thomas R. Guskey, a professor at Georgetown College in Kentucky and an author of “Developing Standards-Based Report Cards,” a book that is soon to be released, said the new approach was more accurate, because it measures each student against a stated set of criteria, rather than grading on a curve, which compares members of a class with one another.

“The dilemma with that system is you really don’t know whether anybody has learned anything,” Dr. Guskey said of grading on a curve. “They could all have done miserably, just some less miserably than others.”

The executive director of the National Association of Secondary School Principals, Gerald Tirozzi — who supports standards-based report cards — said that many educators and parents were far from ready to scrap letter grades, especially for older students, in part because they worry about the ripple effects on things like the honor roll and class rank.

“I think the present grading system — A, B, C, D, F — is ingrained in us,” Mr. Tirozzi said. “It’s the language which college admissions officers understand; it’s the language which parents understand.”

Outside San Francisco, the San Mateo-Foster City district delayed plans to expand standards-based report cards to its four middle schools from its elementary schools, where they have been used since 2006, after parents packed school board meetings and collected more than 500 signatures in opposition.

“What happened was the high-performing students said, ‘I don’t have to work that hard’ and they all stopped trying,” said Ellen Ulrich, a San Mateo mother of two who is lobbying for a hybrid card that would retain letter grades for achievement and effort alongside the 1-to-4 scale for specific skills.

Wilmette, Ill., a Chicago suburb, replaced a confusing array of letters, numbers and symbols with a standards-based format for grades one through four this year. “We wanted parents to clearly know what their child’s actual achievement was,” said Melanie Horowitz, principal of Wilmette’s Central School, “without clouding the issue with how often they turned in their homework or participated in class.”

The sprawling Montgomery County school system in Maryland adopted a standards-based report card at 24 of its 130 elementary schools this year to ensure more consistent grading practices across diverse communities from affluent Potomac to Silver Spring, where there are pockets of low-income families.

And here in Westchester County, the Irvington district switched to the standards-based cards not only to make grading less subjective but also to keep parents better informed on their children’s progress, said Karen Kellogg, an assistant principal.

In Pelham, the second-grade report card includes 39 separate skill scores — 10 each in math and language arts, 2 each in science and social studies, and a total of 15 in art, music, physical education, technology and “learning behaviors” — engagement, respect, responsibility, organization. The report card itself is one page, but it comes with a 14-page guide explaining the different skills and the scoring.

Dennis Lauro, Pelham’s superintendent, said that standards-based report cards helped students chart their own courses for improvement; as part of the process, they each develop individual goals, which are discussed with teachers and parents, and assemble portfolios of work.

“I was never the A student, and it would constantly frustrate me,” Dr. Lauro said. “Nobody ever bothered to tell me how to get that A, to get to that next level.”

Katie Scandole, a fourth grader, taped a list of goals to her lime-green notebook cover; it included working on grammar and reading books to increase her comprehension. “Some I’ve met, some I still need to work on,” she explained.

North Westall, a fifth grader, got 27 3s this marking period, up from 16 on his first report card, in December. “I set a goal to get a 3 in writing and I really, really wanted it,” North said the other day as he went over the numbers in a parent-teacher conference. “I got it because I didn’t rush through my work just to get to the end. I look in the dictionary. I don’t hate it anymore.”

His mother, Rebecca, said afterward that she found the new report cards hard to understand, but was glad students were no longer compared with one another. “I’m not against competition, but I don’t think it belongs in fifth grade,” she said.

But another parent, Janice Ingram Bell, said she found the report cards impersonal, calling them a “bargain-basement version of a report card” that does not distinguish enough between student ability levels. Her second grader, Jennifer, was crushed to find she got straight 2s in English for the second marking period in a row despite having read every night with her parents.

Addressing these parental complaints, Pelham district officials said they planned to change the system next year to use benchmarks for each marking period — rather than a year-end standard — to give more timely snapshots of students’ progress (and allow many more students to earn 4’s from the beginning). They also plan to bring back teacher comments, and are looking for ways to recognize student effort and attitude.

Those changes might help Danielle Como, a fourth grader, with skeptical relatives like her Uncle Vinny. After the first marking period, Uncle Vinny gave Danielle’s sister Nicole, a sixth grader whose middle school uses letter grades, $5 for every A, but scoffed at Danielle’s 2’s and 3’s.

“We’re from the old school where a 4.0 is a good G.P.A., so nobody’s buying her story,” explained the girls’ mother, Mary.

Danielle got her teacher to send an e-mail message explaining the new system, and persuaded Uncle Vinny to cough it up for each 3. Last week, after getting 16 3s, Danielle headed over to see Uncle Vinny.