Written by Kate Pechacek
Time to read: 7 minutes
Fall benchmark season is upon us. Across the country, students are completing reading and math assessments, teachers are poring over results, leadership teams are looking for trends, and schools are beginning to make decisions about instruction and support.
And somewhere in that process, families will probably receive a report.
That report matters. Families absolutely deserve to know how their children are performing. But if our family communication around benchmark assessments ends with sending scores home, even with a small-font score explainer, we may be missing one of the greatest opportunities the assessment gives us. Because a benchmark assessment isn’t just a snapshot of where students are academically. It can also be the beginning of a stronger academic partnership between schools and families.
That distinction feels especially important right now. After several years in which K–12 systems have understandably devoted enormous attention to attendance, behavior, belonging, mental health, and student well-being, there is renewed urgency around academics. The question isn’t whether those other things still matter. Of course they do. It is increasingly about connecting them back to the reason they matter so much in schools: creating the conditions students need to learn and succeed.
Family-school partnership around learning belongs in that conversation, too.
So when those first benchmark results arrive this fall, don’t just ask, “How will we share these results with families?” Ask a bigger question: How can we use these results to make families meaningful partners to their children’s learning all year long?
Here are five places to start.
- Translate the results, not just the language
For those of us who have spent our careers in education, it is easy to forget how much education-specific language we use without thinking about it. Percentiles, proficiency bands, benchmark expectations, scaled scores, growth targets, phonemic awareness, number sense. A report can be technically accurate and still leave a family wondering, “Okay, but what does this actually mean for my child?”
Language access is essential, but understandable communication goes beyond translating words from one language to another. Families need context. What was assessed? What does this result tell us? What doesn’t it tell us? Is this one data point or part of an emerging pattern? Most importantly, what will educators do with this information?
The goal isn’t to make families assessment experts. It’s to make sure they understand enough to be informed partners in their child’s learning.
- Ask families what the benchmark can’t tell you
Benchmark assessments give educators valuable information, but they don’t give us all the information. A reading assessment might tell us that a student is struggling with a particular skill. A family may be able to tell us that their child happily listens to audiobooks for hours, refuses to read aloud because they’re embarrassed, loves graphic novels, or has recently started saying they’re “bad at reading.” That context matters.
After sharing results, create an opportunity for families to contribute what they know. Does this result match what you’re seeing at home? What does your child enjoy? Where do you notice frustration? What seems to help?
Families are experts on their children. When we combine what educators learn through assessment with what families know through a lifetime of knowing their child, we get a much richer picture of the learner in front of us.
- Tell families what the school will do next
One unintended consequence of sending assessment results home without enough context is that families can feel as though the score has somehow become their problem to solve. It hasn’t.
Schools remain responsible for instruction. If benchmark data indicates that a student needs additional support, families should understand how the teacher and school plan to respond. Will instruction change? Is additional practice needed? Will the student receive intervention? What will educators be watching over the next several weeks?
Sharing the plan does two things. It reassures families that the assessment is being used to inform instruction, rather than simply documenting performance, and it establishes an important premise for partnership: we each have a role to play, and we’re going to do this together.
- Give families practical ways to reinforce learning at home
This is where schools sometimes swing too far in the other direction. In an effort to engage families academically, we inadvertently send school home. A packet of worksheets isn’t necessarily going to help build the partnership with families or help the student. Neither is asking a caregiver to replicate specialized instruction at the kitchen table after dinner. Families don’t need to become teachers to have an enormous impact on learning.
Instead, give them a few specific, realistic ways to reinforce what their child is learning in school. For younger students, that might mean a five-minute word game in the car, noticing letter sounds while making dinner, reading together, or practicing with a decodable text. For older students, academic partnership may look less like direct skill practice and more like asking good questions, helping students establish routines, talking about what they’re learning, monitoring progress, and helping them advocate for support when they need it.
The goal isn’t to turn home into another classroom. It is to help families use the environment they already have and the relationship they already have with their child to reinforce learning.
- Close the loop
Perhaps the easiest mistake to make with benchmark communication is treating it as an event. Assessment happens. Results go home. Everyone moves on until the next benchmark window. But imagine the message families receive when schools say, “Here’s what we’re working on. Here’s the progress we’re seeing. What are you noticing?”
Now the assessment isn’t simply a score that was reported. It has become part of an ongoing conversation about learning. That conversation also gives families something assessment reports alone rarely provide: evidence that their participation mattered. They contributed insight, educators acted on the information available, families reinforced learning where appropriate, and everyone gets to see what happened next. That’s academic partnership.
From Reporting Results to Improving Results
None of these strategies is particularly complicated. The challenge, especially at the district level, is making them happen consistently for every family, across every classroom, school, language, and circumstance. This is where technology can either simply make it easier to send information or actually make it possible to engage families in learning at scale.
At TalkingPoints, we think about that process through four connected steps: Reach, Communicate, Engage, Improve.
First, did the benchmark information actually reach every family? Next, was it communicated in a language and format the family could understand? Did that communication become genuine, two-way engagement, where families could contribute knowledge and participate in supporting learning? And ultimately, did that partnership help improve what happens for the student?
TalkingPoints is also now extending that connection and partnership more directly into academics. Our new Academics at Home solution, available for preK-3 reading and math, gives families practical, ongoing ways to support learning through games, opportunities to reinforce classroom learning at home, and skill-building activities such as decodable texts. The goal isn’t to ask families to become teachers. It’s to make it easier for them to do something they are uniquely positioned to do: reinforce and encourage learning as part of everyday life.
Benchmark assessments give schools valuable information about students. But imagine how much more powerful that information becomes when families understand it, add what they know to it, know what educators are doing about it, and have meaningful ways to participate in what happens next.
So this fall, absolutely send the scores home. Just don’t stop there.
Make the Next Step Easy with Academics at Home
Benchmark results tell families where their child is. Academics at Home helps them take the next step. Each week, PreK-3 families get a short, curriculum-aligned literacy or math activity by text, matched to what their child is learning in class. There are no apps, logins, or prep required, and every activity is translated into families’ home languages. It’s a simple way to turn everyday moments, like the car ride or the dinner table, into learning, and to keep the conversation going well past the benchmark window.
