Report cards.........

I teach Grade 6/7 in Kingston, Ontario, and am currently part of a pilot project (along with a number of teachers in a number of schools across the city).. Instead of a traditional report card, with marks and comments that you need to understand "edu-ese" in order to get through, these new reports are not about marks but about progress. Hunh? Well, imagine that. The teachers fill out a report form on each kid, that looks a heck of a lot like the kind of forms I send home around midterm time, and in it, I let the parents know if their child is showing limited progress, or progressing with difficulty, or progressing well, in each of the subjects (we're talking a sort of continuum line checklist) and how they are doing in areas of homework completion and conflict resolution and about 10 other areas (Excellent, Good or Needs Improvement). Then I interview every parent, and talk to them for (supposedly) 15 minutes, and that's it for the report cards. What do you think? I actually like this project. A few parents have said that they want the marks. Well, sometimes, it is difficult to do the mark thing at the first term (and we are actually not yet done the first term- it goes until Christmas)-because we have to do baseline in this, and authentic assessment in that, and diagnostic in this other- so what have we taught? The reports were faster to do than in other years- the check mark was nice, as was the notion that I didn't have to write comments for each subject (which, truthfully, is a gigantic pain in the nether regions). But I really liked the interviews. I could say things in these interviews that I would be hard pressed to write on a report. My body language, or comments leading up to the message- whatever- easier to say out in the open rather than couched in edu-terms that sometimes mean absolutely nothing to the parent. So what are your ideas?