Are your kids on grade level? Campaign encourages Tarrant County parents to be sure.

In the coming weeks, Tarrant County residents will begin seeing billboards, ads and social media messages with a troubling message: Your kids may not be doing as well in school as you think.

A group of about 70 local nonprofits, government agencies and businesses are rallying behind a messaging campaign designed to convince parents to ask for more information on their kids’ academic performance.

The campaign, called Go Beyond Grades, is a part of a broader effort by the national nonprofit Learning Heroes to call attention to a mismatch between the grades students get on their report cards and how state assessments indicate they’re doing academically. David Park, the group’s senior vice president, said parents need better information about how their kids are doing, especially as many students continue to struggle to make up the ground they lost during the pandemic.

“A lot of kids still aren’t caught up after COVID,” he said. “It took an enormous toll on learning.”

Report cards don’t paint complete picture of academic progress

A poll conducted by Learning Heroes in February and March indicated that parents of Tarrant County public school students almost universally think their kids are doing well academically. Of those surveyed, 96% thought their kids were at or above grade level in reading, and 92% thought they were at or above grade level in math.

But state test scores tell a different story. Across the county, just 52% of public school students scored on grade level or better on last spring’s State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, or STAAR. Just 43% scored on grade level or better in math.

That problem isn’t unique to Fort Worth. In a national survey conducted last fall, about 90% of parents said they thought their kids were performing on grade level or better, and nearly 80% said their kids received mostly Bs or better on their report cards. The poll was conducted by Gallup in partnership with Learning Heroes.

In separate research released earlier this year by SchoolStatus, an education communications software firm, 45% of parents surveyed said too-infrequent communication from schools kept them from feeling adequately informed about their kids’ academic progress.

The disconnect comes in part from the way students’ grades are calculated. While state test scores at least theoretically show how well students have mastered the subject they’re being tested on, grades often take many other factors into account, including effort, class participation and attendance. So a student who puts forth effort and participates in class discussions but still struggles to master a subject might get an artificially inflated score.

Grading experts say that’s an issue because it often gives parents no way to know if their kids are having a hard time in a particular subject. If parents know where their kids are struggling, they can give them extra help at home, talk to their teacher about what they need or find a private tutor. But they can’t do any of those things if they don’t know there’s a problem.

Summer learning is a priority of campaign

Park, the Learning Heroes official, said the campaign is intended to encourage parents to talk to their kids’ teachers about whether they’re on grade level in reading and math, seek out more information about how they’re doing academically and look into summer learning programs if their kids need help catching up.

Summer learning is a particular priority for the campaign because parents are beginning to make plans for the summer months, Park said. Parents who know their kids need extra help might be willing to make summer learning programs a priority if they know they exist, he said. Researchers have said that summer learning programs haven’t had much success closing academic gaps left by the pandemic, at least in part because not enough students sign up and many of those who do attend miss too many sessions. Park said the campaign is meant to make parents aware that those resources exist and why their kids might need them

The Tarrant County campaign is the eighth local Go Beyond Grades effort the group has launched, Park said. There have been similar campaigns in New York, Boston, Chicago, Houston, Sacramento, St. Louis and Washington, D.C. In those cities, the nonprofit worked with an evaluator to look at how effective the messaging had been. They found that parents who specifically remembered having seen one of the campaign’s messages were more likely to take action, like talking to their kids’ teachers before the end of the school year, looking for measures of academic achievement other than their kids’ report cards or signing their kids up for summer learning, he said.

Learning Heroes picked Tarrant County for its next local campaign because there’s already a large group of local nonprofits and foundations working on education issues here. The campaign is usually most effective when there are local organizations that are willing to cooperate, he said. The fact that more than 70 Fort Worth area groups offered to help is an indication that city leaders are committed to the idea, he said.

Pandemic taught groups to collaborate, United Way chief says

Leah King, director of United Way Tarrant County, said the large number of organizations backing the campaign is the result of an unusually collaborative environment among nonprofits and other groups in Fort Worth. United Way is one of the organizations backing the campaign.

Those groups had always worked together to a certain extent, King said, but COVID-19 forced them to align their efforts more than ever. During the pandemic, Tarrant County Judge Glen Whitley held weekly meetings with leaders from local hospitals, nonprofits, schools and businesses to talk over how each was responding, where they needed help and what was being left undone, she said. Those efforts strengthened partnerships that already existed among agencies and nonprofits and created new ones where none existed, she said.

Education is any area that’s ripe for partnerships, King said. Schools play the lead role, she said, but teachers can’t help students succeed without close partnerships with parents. Community-based organizations have a role to play, too, she said, ensuring that parents and teachers have access to information they need to help students succeed.

Parent advocate says schools must be more transparent

Trenace Dorsey-Hollins, leader of the education advocacy group Parent Shield Fort Worth, said she thinks more parents are becoming aware of the disconnect between grades and how their kids are actually doing academically. The group has been pushing Fort Worth area school districts to give parents more information about their kids’ progress, in a form parents can understand.

Last summer, the organization offered a series of literacy clinics across Fort Worth. During those clinics, teachers gave students reading assessments and walked parents through the results. Some parents were shocked to find out their kids were several grades behind in reading, even though they consistently received good grades on their report cards.

Since then, Dorsey-Hollins said she’s seen more parents take action. Last month, Parent Shield launched a program called Literacy is Freedom Texas, or LIFT, in conjunction with Boys and Girls Club of Tarrant County. The program offers free intervention for kids who have fallen behind in reading, she said. A few weeks into the program, attendance has been good, she said. Many of the families who have attended are the same ones who came to last summer’s reading clinics, she said.

Dorsey-Hollins said she hopes the campaign will help more parents and other community members understand the disconnect between grades and student achievement. As more parents learn about that mismatch, she hopes to see more of them getting involved in their kids’ education and advocating for their needs.

But even more than that, Dorsey-Hollins said she wants to see more parents understand how many resources are available to help them. Many parents feel lost after learning their kids are behind in school, she said, but there’s a wealth of information online about how they can pinpoint the problems and work with them to catch up.

“You don’t have to be the expert,” she said. “You don’t have to know everything.”

Transparency is still the biggest issue for parents who are trying to figure out whether their kids need extra help, Dorsey-Hollins said. Most parents see good grades on their kids’ report cards and assume everything is fine, she said. Teachers can often give a clearer picture of where a student is academically, but many parents would never think to schedule a time to talk to their kids’ teachers because they don’t know there’s a problem, she said.

Dorsey-Hollins said she thinks school leaders know about the transparency issue, and many are taking it seriously. Earlier this year, officials in Fort Worth ISD began the process of moving the district toward a standards-based grading system at the elementary school level. The district began phasing the new grading system in at the pre-K level this year. If the implementation goes smoothly, the district could roll the new model out across all grades from pre-K through fifth grade by the 2025-26 school year.

Under a standards-based grading model, instead of letter grades, students receive ratings showing how they’re doing on each skill and concept covered in class that year. Grading experts say the model offers a more accurate look at how students are doing because it separates academic mastery out from other factors like effort and behavior.

But Dorsey-Hollins said the district still has problems with the way it communicates with parents, both about students’ grades and other issues. She pointed to the district’s handling of the school closure process. During a presentation to the Fort Worth City Council in February, Superintendent Angélica Ramsey said district leaders were nowhere near a decision on which campuses would need to be closed. Two weeks later, the district announced plans to merge Wedgwood Middle School and Wedgwood Sixth Grade and close the sixth-grade campus.

Resources are available for kids who need extra help

Brent Beasley, director of the Fort Worth Education Partnership, said he hopes the campaign will help Tarrant County parents understand the problem. There’s a certain amount of awareness of the issue among city leaders, he said — he’s given presentations on the disconnect to the Fort Worth City Council and other groups.

But until that awareness makes its way down to parents making decisions about their kids’ education, Beasley said it will be a difficult problem to solve. That’s because the lack of awareness itself is the main factor driving the issue. If parents know that their kids need extra help, he’s confident that most will either offer it themselves or find outside help like after-school tutoring. There’s no lack of resources available for parents who know to look for them, he said. But the grading system most schools use isn’t designed to help parents understand when their kids need help.

Beasley said he hopes the campaign will help spread that message more broadly than local community organizations have been able to do on their own. Once parents start to see messages about the mismatch on their drive to and from work or when they open their favorite social media apps, he hopes they’ll be more likely to have a conversation with their kids’ teachers.

“There’s a big gap there between what people believe and what is the reality,” he said. “... We have a lot of faith in parents, that they will do what they have to do to take care of their kids if they know the reality.”

Disclaimer: The Star-Telegram is among the community organizations supporting the Go Beyond Grades campaign. Another of the campaign’s backers is the Sid W. Richardson Foundation, which also supports the Star-Telegram’s education coverage through its Crossroads Lab. All editorial decisions are made independently.