The grade gap: Helping parents understand students’ academic progress

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.

Previous 1 2