<p>Just wondering- what kind of school lets teachers write “off the cuff” remarks on a report card? Private? Even our local public school doesn’t do that. Comments are carefully screened. D’yer, did you think that your son suffered in the admissions process as a result?</p>
<p>Local public schools wouldn’t be likely to do that. I think a public school system has processes and controls that would preclude handwritten comments and notes or unscreened messages from getting through, if only due to the sheer numbers. A small private school on the other hand…well, that would be the type of school that might not have tight controls. </p>
<p>That’s not really the point, though. Where comments are screened and vetted, the concern is that there’s a huge difference between comments sent home for middle school parents and comments made where the teachers understand up front that these comments are going to be reviewed by admission committees and the school is a stakeholder in having success at placing students in top boarding schools.</p>
<p>As for whether he suffered as a result, no. Everything went well in terms of outcomes – which is not to say he was accepted everywhere. I just doubt any comment altered an outcome – for better or worse. </p>
<p>It sure would help, though, to know what the boarding school is seeing when the application goes in. That was a surprise to me. Especially when a handwritten comment from a PE teacher – directed to me because I had helped out with that unit – was called out by one dean of admissions. My (unstated) reaction was, “Whoa! Time out! You saw that? If you saw THAT, then what ELSE did admission committees read in the various teacher comments that I didn’t think twice about in terms of the application?”</p>
<p>Maybe I’m the only one who would be surprised by this. Perhaps this is well under control for this year’s applicants. In that case, carry on, there’s nothing to see here. If not, then I hope my surprise last March proves helpful to those going through the process this year.</p>
<p>Your experience D’yer (although I didn’t know about it until just now) is EXACTLY why I have asked - and will ask again - to see exactly what is being sent to the secondary schools in terms of the “transcript.” If it does include any comments or info that may need explaining, we can do so in the application and/or ask that recommendations do so. </p>
<p>I don’t know about “off the cuff” comments, but I do know that some of my son’s mid-term comments were quite harsh in terms of his effort. Reading those would do serious damage to his application, although by the end of the term, he would almost always pull it together.</p>
<p>Are you saying that the comments aren’t an accurate portrayal of your child’s educational biography or that it is information you wouldn’t want a prospective school to see? I would argue that the right school for your child will know how to interpret this information and will be looking at the whole package - including the all-important interview with you and your child. I think the times this gets nerve wracking is when a family is trying to hide something or when you are applying to a school that is looking for reasons to reject applicants rather than reasons to accept applicants.</p>
<p>The comments, in our case, are accurate - but the ones that I wouldn’t want shared are for a three week time frame. In those 3 weeks, in one class, the comment was something like “It certainly shows your intellegence that you were able to get this grade considering the amount of effort you put in”<br>
That same teacher we WILL be asking to write one of the additional recommendations for my son. Why? Because he has come full circle and he has him again this year and the teacher can write about his growth and development - that will help offset the B and B-'s from last year. </p>
<p>The recommendations from the school and others are important. They may say “Johnny is developing” or “Johnny HAS developed” that difference is key.</p>
<p>I think this is an area where it should be a concern – or at least well-understood – by parents whose kids are not attending feeder schools.</p>
<p>Consider how teachers at “non-feeder” schools act:</p>
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<p>Is there reason to believe that this teacher (or these teachers) are hard-wired to be writing report cards with an eye towards sharing an accurate student biographical account for other professionals to review? They’re acting like the OP’s daughter was selected for the next Space Shuttle mission. And not so professionally.</p>
<p>And consider this reaction from another non-feeder school parent:</p>
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<p>Where teachers at feeder schools understand that part of their mission is to maintain a good track record of admittance into top prep schools, the exact opposite can be true at schools where the teachers and administrators are expected to retain students in the system and prepare the students only for success in the upper school or high school that everyone else typically advances to or through.</p>
<p>Parents from these schools need to understand that they lack a very important resource in the application process: a school that’s savvy to boarding school options and being as committed to aiding students achieving that near-term goal as they are committed to aiding students navigate educational pathways that are more commonly followed by the student population.</p>
<p>I don’t know if the word “intellegence” was the spelling actually used by the teacher who wrote the comments in Linda S’s son’s report card:</p>
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<p>I do know that, in our experience, my wife and I would laugh at how poorly educators spelled in report cards and other school communications…when, in fact, those sorts of gaffes reflect poorly on the school and teachers who, an admissions committee might think, may not have prepared the applicant quite as thoroughly for a top prep school as they would like. I suspect that a feeder school is not going to let comments go out that reflect back on the school in such a negative fashion.</p>
<p>And Linda S nailed it when she pointed out the distinction between “Johnny is developing” and “Johnny HAS developed” – with a junior prep school teacher being much more likely to consciously choose the latter while it’s a crapshoot as to whether you get one or the other from teachers at middle schools where they assume their comments are seen by the parents before going into a black hole, never to be considered again.</p>
<p>Parents from these non-feeder schools have a little extra work to do. And they need to be aware of the fact that they need to be diligent and vigilant about helping their child’s school deal with the application process. That’s tough for parents who are often facing a steep learning curve of their own. And these parents need to understand that – as in the case of Britham – a report card comment by a coach or P.E. instructor who is affirmatively resisting the applicant’s efforts might be seen by the admissions committees.</p>
<p>That last fact from Britham is what triggered me off on the whole “report card/transcript” thing. It struck me that a parent might be dealing with a teacher who resists the applicant’s boarding school efforts but assume that there’s no real threat since that teacher isn’t writing a recommendation and a comment tossed in to a report card will go no further than that black hole.</p>
<p>I think the point is not that parents need to engineer a educational biography of their child that departs from reality. It’s that parents whose children are in non-feeder schools need to have a better understanding of – and play a role in educating – what their child’s schools are doing with respect to supporting their child’s application.</p>
<p>My son used to go to a K-12 day school. I felt plenty of tension when we let it be known that he was applying to boarding schools, and they did not want us to leave – my reward for being an active volunteer. They did send the progress report for 8th grade with comments because of deadlines, or perhaps because I didn’t know enough to request the final 1st half transcript. The comments looked fine to me, but they could have been used as a negative screening device. It would be best to have an apples to apples comparison to other applicants. I think the other reports were standard transcripts. I think the schools that end in 8th or 9th grade generally do a great job with applications. I imagine that public schools vary in responsiveness.</p>
<p>That was my typo on “intellegence.” But we have seen some typos on report cards that have made us laugh. That one would have been pretty funny.</p>