The grade gap: Helping parents understand students’ academic progress

Key points:

The communication between school and home fundamental to student success
We need accessible data and greater student agency
Data-driven decision-making is the key to unlocking K-12 district success
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For as long as school has existed, so has the parental question: How are my kids doing? For nearly two centuries, educators have used some type of report card to communicate with families how their children are progressing in school. While the common A-F system is a more modern version, the concept of grades on report cards and what they tell parents about student progress has been pretty much the same.

Report cards might be the norm, but do they communicate a complete picture of student learning? That is the more important question for parents. Recent studies noted that most parents feel confident they understand how their child is doing academically. They cite report cards as their primary source, and most said they believe their child is meeting grade-level expectations and doing just fine in reading and math.

Why grades alone are not enough to understand academic performance

But here’s the rub: Other sources beyond report cards say otherwise. The most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) showed that only 30 percent of U.S. 4^th graders performed at or above NAEP Proficient in reading, and 39 percent at that level for mathematics. It’s even more dire for 8^th graders. Only 29 percent performed at or above NAEP Proficient in reading and 28 percent in math. Interim assessments, like NWEA’s MAP Growth, show similar trends. What’s even more concerning is that students are struggling more academically in the post-COVID era than their peers just a decade ago, and yet nearly 90 percent of parents surveyed by Learning Heroes said their child is on track for grade-level proficiency. There is a clear disconnect.

One possible reason for this disconnect is grade inflation, in which students receive higher grades over time without a corresponding increase in achievement, knowledge, or skills. For parents who rely primarily on grades, this may explain why they have a more positive view of their child’s academic performance.

Grade inflation is not a new phenomenon, but it may have received a boost during the pandemic as districts adjusted academic standards and loosened grading practices in response to the widespread disruptions to learning.

Researchers at the CALDER Center examined whether an A or a B represented the same levels of achievement before and after the pandemic, using data from Washington state. They found that grades rose during the pandemic and remained elevated even after schools returned to normal schooling. Their study noted that students earning the same grades as their pre-pandemic peers often scored lower on state assessments, suggesting that grades may be a less reliable indicator of academic performance. Grades can also be inflated by non-academic measures that are lumped in with performance, such as participation, behavior, pressure on teachers to not “fail students,” and parental expectation and advocacy (for example, for college admission).

How can educators provide the kinds of information families want that will help close this gap between how they think their children are doing and the reality?

How to help families understand academic progress: Three recommendations

A report card reports. What closes the gap between reporting and understanding is explanation: real-time context for what an absence, a grade, or a test score actually means for a student’s learning, delivered in the language a family speaks at home. Three shifts make that possible:

Treat attendance like academic performance. A teacher doesn’t wait for a failing grade to call home. Missing homework, behavioral issues, or a sudden change in attention often prompt outreach to families. Attendance deserves the same urgency. Waiting until a pattern has fully formed means a student has already missed enough class time to fall behind academically. Families need that translated plainly: Missing two days a month equals missing about one in 10 school days, and every one of those means missed instruction on a specific skill the student needs to progress. Early outreach works. 2025-26 attendance data from over a million students shows 54 percent of students at-risk of chronic absenteeism returning to school after a single early contact. Close the gap while it’s still small, before it compounds into the kind of loss the CALDER researchers found so hard to reverse.
Give literacy assessment scores context. Proficiency numbers tell only part of the story. A reading level or test score can’t show whether a child decodes well but struggles to comprehend, reads fluently but avoids reading alone, or is progressing steadily but needs targeted support to stay on pace. What closes the gap is context: what skill is developing, what’s going well, what needs reinforcement, and what a family can do at home tonight. That’s a different conversation than a report card, and it’s the one families need to support their students’ progress.
Bring students into the conversation. Students at every age can name what feels easy, what feels hard, and what they wish they understood better. A first grader can point to the word wall word that still trips them up, using sentence starters like “I’m getting good at” and “I still need help with.” A ninth grader can say plainly that they guess on word problems instead of showing their work. Those self-assessments belong in the parent conference, in the student’s own words. Families trust what their child tells them as much or more than what a teacher reports. Pairing the two gives a full, honest picture of where a student actually stands.

We’ve developed a wide array of efficient systems to capture student progress and communicate it, like letter grades, transcripts, and mass notifications. Given the number of students moving through K-12 districts, those systems are critical. But the work of learning is human, connected, and reliant on certain conditions being met first: A student must be present, engaged, and ready to learn. Creating those conditions is in large part the work of families. That makes the communication between school and home fundamental to student success. Our task now is to move beyond expediency and towards partnership by providing a fuller picture of learning.