Grandmas use them to brag about their grandkids.

Colleges use them to decide who gets in and who doesn't.

For more than a century, American public education has come to rely on letter grades - A, B, C, D and F - as the universally understood measure of a student's academic worth.

But in the Meridian School District, those familiar grading icons will begin to fade away this year, replaced by a 1-through-4 number system aimed at telling parents more definitively what skills students are able to demonstrate and how proficient they are.

The Meridian District, Idaho's biggest with about 33,000 students, will do away with letter grades in elementary math beginning with report cards this quarter. Parents will get the cards at parent-teacher conferences Nov. 5-7.

Over the next several years, district officials expect to extend the grading system to nearly all subjects and likely through middle school.

The old system of grading is too vague, said Jackie Thomason, the district's director of assessment and accountability. Letter grades often combine a teacher's assessment of knowledge, homework completion, extra credit and behavior.

"We've averaged everything together," Thomason said. People would "never really know what made up the grade."

Meridian's new system is aimed at answering just one question for parents: Can Johnny do the math that a student in his grade is expected to do?

The new report card drills deeper than traditional ones. In fifth-grade math, for example, students are measured on several skills such as addition, subtraction, estimation, spatial relationships, probability and statistical measurements.

The new grades are an outgrowth of the shift toward education standards, in which states and districts have outlined grade-by-grade specifically what students should learn and be able to do.

Those standards became the basis for achievement tests to measure how well students meet academic goals. The new report card now will inform parents how well their children are meeting those standards.

CHANGES STUDENTS, PARENTS WILL SEE

The new number system is meant to tell parents where their children are in relation to the state's standards for what children should know. A "4" means the students exceed the standards. A "1" means they are not meeting standards.

Papers that come home to parents will have a different look.

Where parents might have seen a percentage representing the portion of their children's work done correctly, they will now likely see a "P" or an "E." The "P" stands for practice, and is a sign to parents that the work was meant to help students build their skills. "E" stands for evidence, and shows parents that the teacher is using the work as an indicator of how well students are meeting their skill requirements.

District officials say one strength of the standards-based report card is that students don't pay the price for doing poorly when they first start learning a subject. The new system grades only in how well students are doing at grading time. Thomason likens this to learning to ride a bicycle. Students may need training wheels for a while, and they may fall down a couple of times. But they are not penalized as long as they learn how to ride the bicycle.

WHERE IT'S DONE

Standards-based grading isn't new in the country. Elsewhere in the Treasure Valley, the Nampa School District is in the early stages of looking at a standards-based grading plan.

The Stockton (Calif.) Unified School District, with about 38,000 students, has been using it for about five years in kindergarten through sixth grades and for about two years in seventh and eighth grades.

Stockton phased out social promotion and began moving students along to higher grades only after demonstrating they had attained mastery in their subjects, said Maria Sofia Robledo, a district administrator.

School officials also concluded that letter grades were often higher than students' skills suggested they should be - which is grade inflation - and that the traditional A-F system was subjective. Stockton's new grading "forces you to be objective," Robledo said.

Parents "didn't get it at first," she said. They wanted to know which number was equivalent to an A.

But over time, much of the criticism has abated, she said.

STANDARDS GRADING BRINGS CHALLENGES

A grading system that assesses how well students meet standards has its own problems.

Meridian is wrestling with issues such as how to assess subjects like art or music. Standards may outline things students should know, such as reading music or certain art concepts. But how do you assess the indefinable thing in art that transcends the compilation of knowledge about the subject?

Meridian is still working on that, Thomason said.

Another problem: In high school, students need a grade-point average for college entrance or scholarships. Meridian likely won't take its new grading system into its high schools because it doesn't produce a GPA, Thomason said.

Stockton hasn't taken its standards-based grading to high school, and it still hands out letter grades in eighth-grade algebra, one of the few courses students take in middle school that can go onto their high school transcripts.

Poland Regional High School in Poland, Maine, put standards-based grading in place for its 570 students about a decade ago. But school counselors also calculate a grade-point average for high school students who need it to get into college or qualify for scholarships. Those GPAs aren't published, but go directly to colleges that require them, said Cari Medd, Poland High principal.

WHAT PARENTS THINK

Parents are divided over the new system.

"I think it is great," said Melanie Deaton, who has a first- and third-grader at Paramount Elementary School. Traditional report cards hand out a single grade for a subject. That means parents may not realize that a student could be strong in one part of the subject and weak in another. "A lot of time we don't really know what our kids need," Deaton said.

But David Hunter, with a first- and third-grader at the new Siena K-8 Magnet School, isn't convinced. He doesn't think the new system is any clearer than the old one.

"It seems to me that this new grading method simply creates a more convoluted way of grading children, which will be harder to interpret and understand," he wrote to district officials.

Hunter said students should get percentage grades, such as an 85 percent or a 65 percent in math, to show parents how close or far their children are from the goal. Students in each grade throughout the district would take the same exams.

Bill Roberts: 377-6408