It’s that time of year again, when students await their final grades, with anticipation and trepidation.

A single letter can make a great deal of difference, between moving on in one’s school career, or repeating a grade.

Schools, too, will be getting the dreaded report cards next week, too. This is the second report card with an A-F grade for each of the schools, and according to the Maine Department of Education, about one in six schools will have made at least a letter grade improvement over their initial “grade” last year.

Schools will get their grades on Tuesday, and they will be made public on the DOE’s website on Thursday.

Forty-one schools — 32 elementary and 9 high schools — “failed” last year. None were in the Mid-coast, although several schools were not tested, and two elementary schools earned a ‘D’. Only one school in our service area — Pownal Elementary School — earned an ‘A’.

Locally, Brunswick, Mt. Ararat and Freeport High Schools earned a ‘B’, while Morse High, Lisbon High, and Wiscasset High earned a ‘C’. However, that doesn’t tell the whole story.

At Morse High, fewer than 39 percent of students were proficient in mathematics. Lisbon students scored less than 44 percent. The number in Wiscasset was 47.37 percent. In Brunswick, that number was somewhat better, at 56 percent, while in Freeport, the number was a little less than 48 percent but proficiency was improving. Math proficiency was also below 48 percent at Mt. Ararat High School, but they were making progress. Students who are in 11th grade are likely to have had Algebra and geometry, and should be entering Algebra II, if they are at grade level.

Regardless of their letter grade, all of these schools, even Brunswick, which scored the highest, would be flunking math if proficiency were the only item being looked at.

They had been tested using the SAT, and this is the last year that assessment tool will be used, so this will be the last “report card” issued this way.

The grade based program doesn’t tell everything there is to tell about a school. We can’t tell the number of children attending who have special needs, or cognitive issues, such as dyslexia. We don’t know, except for what we know about the makeup of the towns themselves, what the child poverty rate is, or how many of the students in that town are homeschooled or are going to a private school or a charter school. So this tool is a meat cleaver, where a delicate fish knife is likely called for.

Nevertheless, our students will be moving toward a proficiency based diploma within the next few years, and some of our schools seem to be moving backward.

It isn’t just about money, either. Some schools in the high B to C range are very well-funded indeed, while others are not. It’s not about the number of masters-prepared teachers, either. Morse High has more mastersprepared teachers than Freeport has, but earned a lower grade.

After this new report card comes out on Tuesday, and is analyzed, school boards, teachers, and parents must sit down for a heart-to-heart, and if appropriate, students at middle and high school levels should be included as well. We should be looking at what succeeding schools do well, and what schools that are struggling significantly are not doing well. We should be prepared to throw out any teaching system — even the sacred laptop program — that isn’t working for the majority of our students, and go back to the chalkboard.