Alberta wants to make changes to report cards in schools

The province wants to shake up report cards and provide parents with more information about what's happening in schools. A bill tabled in the legislature will allow the minister to tackle both. Most importantly of all, doing so will help ensure that parents are receiving the highest degree of transparency possible and that's the primary driver behind these changes. Nicolaides says school boards will still choose the format of report cards. Alongside that, the bill requires school divisions to track any complaints that weren't resolved at the school level, and schools would need to tell parents what staff did on professional development days. The organization representing school councils says this kind of increased The increased reporting could help improve public trust in the education system. Some parents look at those school calendars and they go, oh my gosh, we've got like 20 PD days or 15 PD days throughout the school year. What am I supposed to do? The association representing teachers says it's worrisome that the government plans to collect information about school level conflicts. I don't want this to become a tattletale line, a snitch line of some sort. Boards have a process already in place. The opposition says the bill shows the government's priorities are out of sync with public concern. on issues like class size, class complexity, and school space. And instead what we see is this government once again trying to throw red meat on the table and focus on small bones to pick and create more adversarial relationships between parents and teachers and to somehow believe that the top priority in education right now is standardized report cards. Exactly what the report cards will have to include, we don't yet know. The minister says he'll issue a series of orders later with those details. Any changes would take effect next school year. Janet French, CBC News, Edmonton.