The One Where I Am Missing Something

Yesterday I had benchmark reports for each child in my class, comparing their performance to some benchmarks set by persons unknown for the Fountas and Pinnell literacy assessments.  These are meant to be sent home.

Findings:

1. I hope the plan for the future is to have these by conference week, so I can explain them.
2. I really wish we had an entry record, because you can see the growth from the first to second trimester, but if the district is really collecting data to drive instruction, you need to know where kids are when they start the year.
3. By "data to drive instruction", I would like to mean "data to inform equity in funding".  Based on the Brigance, which was an entry assessment and had percentiles for the district and the school, in general my students start less ready than their District-wide peers.  (Many of my students don't attend preschool and my classes generally have more English Language Learners than average, I believe.  This impacts their entry assessment.)
4. Who is setting these benchmarks?   The second trimester for letter recognition is 30 out of 52.  By November, I want all of my class  to be done with the alphabet, and typically everyone is.
5. Similarly, the benchmark is 15 of 25 sight words, 8 of 10 on concepts about print, etc.  Overall, these benchmarks seem awfully low.
6. That said, I am not assessing segmenting yet and I didn't assess it at the end of the first trimester.  After nine weeks, I haven't taught enough to make assessment useful, and after eighteen it is a lot of testing for something that will not drive instruction.
7. So some of this is probably difference in curricula (Treasures doesn't teach that many sight words and probably does a lot of phonemic awareness), but not all of it.