Courtney Rawlins remembers those days in grade school when she and her classmates would get on the bus carrying a report card sealed in an envelope. Five subjects with letter grades ranging from A to F awaited the child.

"You would open it, and boom," she said. "That's how you were doing."

If her third-grader tried to look at his own report card the same way, he would have no idea what to take from it.

His four-page report card has a 39-page rubric to explain what each line item might mean.

"Why is there a 39-page document to understand my 8-year-old's report card?" she asked.

Rawlins, whose children attend public schools in the St. Louis area, says she understands the district's desire to provide parents with detailed information.

"But you can't see the forest for the trees," she said.

For parents with children in grade school now, the changes in the school report card can be shocking.

We grew up with a standard system of reporting grades, pretty much throughout the country. Now, each district in each state may have its own method of marking grades. The school may use a system of numbers from 1 to 4 (or 1 to 5), letters representing words from Needs Improvement to Outstanding, or a range of words from Below to Proficient to Advanced. And the kindergarten to second grade report cards may be different from the upper grades.

The report card used to be the primary tool for parents to quickly understand how well their child was doing in school. It's become anything but.

Kevin Beckner, coordinator of student assessment in St. Louis' Parkway School District, says he is sympathetic to parents' frustrations.

"The current elementary school report card is four pages long. In English (alone), there are 21 different things we mark. We are looking at how we streamline that," he said.

But even the older system of letter grades was not as clear as we assumed it to be, he said. "A B- means different things to different people," he said. For some people, a C might represent the average. For others, it means something is off-track with the student's learning.

"So, which is it?" he asked. Most parents today would not accept a report card filled with C's for a child who is meeting expectations as he should.

"We all had, growing up, one system. We internalized what the connection was between the learning and the letter," he said. Now, the goal is to more clearly communicate specifically what a student is learning, and there's a different language used to express that. Sometimes, things get lost in translation.

"Sure, you're 'meeting the expectation,'" Rawlins said. "But what does that really mean?" She's seen her child get the same score in two subjects, one of which she believes he is much stronger in than the other.

"My concern is that we can float through thinking our children are doing fine, but could they be doing better?"

Beckner said his district trains teachers to provide detailed comments on the report cards and answer any questions through emails, calls or conferences. Rawlins agrees that, in her own school, it's the direct communication with the teachers that is most helpful.

The gradual shift in report cards over the past decade reflects the move toward referencing grades against how well students reach a given standard. It's difficult for parents to know how well the student has mastered that material compared to his or her peers. If your child gets a "3" in math, an "S" for Satisfactory or a "Proficient" for meeting expectations, how wide is that range of 'Satisfactory'? Has she learned the material solidly, near the top of the pack, or is she barely scraping by? In a previous era, this may have been communicated by the difference between a B- and a B+.

Now, there may be dozens of subcategories within math, each with its own score, and the parent is left to decipher how well the child has learned what was taught.

It can get even more complicated depending on a teacher's own interpretation of how to score each grading period. For example, one teacher may measure how a student is progressing compared to their goal for the year. Near the beginning of the year, a student may earn a "P" for Progressing, with that grade hopefully reflecting full mastery by the end of the year. In the very same school, the teacher in the next classroom may be marking students based on how well they've learned the content simply within that given grading period.

This lack of consistency within schools and across districts makes the report card less useful for parents.

Rawlins, who has a degree in economics, said she has an understanding of numbers and spreadsheets, but that the complicated report cards still baffle her. She plans to ask her school to host a Parents Night to explain the mysteries behind the report cards.

"I understand what the reports cards are trying to communicate," she said, "but sometimes they lead to more questions than answers."

When the topic of America's mediocre international ranking in student achievement comes up, there are a few typical reactions among adults.

Invariably, there's denial: Our students are more creative and innovative than those in countries that produce robotic test-takers. The test is somehow flawed. Those low-performing students must be at other (read: poor) schools.

Or there's anxiety: Our children are going to be left behind in the global economy. This fear leads those who can afford it to pour more time and resources into their children and their education, continually upping the ante and the latent stress levels.

And, of course, there's blame. Pick your target: lazy students, bad parents, lousy teachers, greedy unions, inefficient bureaucracies, not enough government funding or too much governmental meddling. It's easier, though ultimately futile, to scapegoat than commit to ideas of how we can improve our system.

Each of these knee-jerk reactions miss the most disquieting questions of all: Why do the most privileged American teenagers in the best schools and with well-educated parents still perform worse in math than affluent children in 27 other countries? Why does our country spend more than other countries on students but get less in performance? Why has America's performance on a common measuring stick remained essentially flat for decades, while students in other countries have skyrocketed to the top in a short amount of time?

Journalist Amanda Ripley investigated these mysteries in her book "The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way." She took the Program for International Student Assessment herself and found it to be a sound yardstick. She then followed three American teenagers who chose to spend a year in school at one of three high-performing countries: Finland, South Korea and Poland. She looked at what American schools, students and families were doing differently than their counterparts in the top-performing countries.

She, and the students she followed, discovered curricula and schoolwork far more rigorous than ours in their schools abroad. They met teachers who were better prepared to teach and more respected for their profession. It was harder to become a teacher in these other countries. Their selective teacher training schools attracted the brightest and best. Their cultures ingrained high expectations for all students, and the competition among peers raised the bar. While the American communities focused heavily on sports, the countries with the smartest students focused on academic skills, critical thinking and training programs.

Ripley's work should inform the current discussion about President Obama's proposal to offer two free years of community college to any student who maintains a 2.5 grade-point average and makes progress toward a degree or technical certificate in a high-demand field.

There is an appeal to the idea of making the basics of higher education available to all students willing to work for it, to give them a shot at the American dream. It's in the country's best interest to have a trained and educated workforce that can fill the jobs at home and grow the economy.

But how well do community colleges actually perform? They tackle the outcome of an underperforming K-12 system. They serve close to half of all undergraduates in the U.S., and nearly half those students require remedial coursework. It seems ludicrous to inject rigor into a system struggling to bring students to baseline, doesn't it?

But consider the natural consequence of setting the bar too low: "Far too few of those students persist to achieve the educational outcomes that would change their lives and their families' lives for generations to come. By six years after college entry, only 46 percent of community college students have earned a certificate or associate degree, have transferred to a 4-year institution, or are still enrolled," wrote Kay McClenney, director of the Center for Community College Student Engagement, in a 2012 opinion piece.

Yes, community colleges expand college attainment rates for students who otherwise wouldn't attend college at all. Making higher education more accessible is an important goal. But community colleges -- as well as our lagging K-12 schools -- should take this proposal as a challenge to incorporate greater academic rigor, high expectations and consequences for all vested parties.

Are we less willing to have that discussion because deep down, we don't believe American students can be the smartest in the world?

A steady stream of letters arrived in Heidi Hogan's mailbox from the same woman two or three times a week.

The two women had lost touch for 10 years, but once they reconnected, the notes rolled in for 23 years, as reliable as the sunrise.

The writer found Hogan at a low moment. She had just lost her mother-in-law, to whom she had been very close.

Ten years earlier, when she was 22, Hogan was in a car accident with her young family. Her husband, 23, and their daughter, 14 months, died in the accident. She and her son, 3, survived. Her mother-in-law had remained a connection to all she had lost, and was more like a mother to her than her own mom. The loss hit her hard.

And that's when her godmother found her again.

Lenore Anderson had been a church secretary in Milwaukee when she met Hogan's parents. Anderson's own parents had died when she was young and she had no immediate family to speak of. Hogan's parents took her under their wing. She frequently joined their family for dinner after church. They asked her to be Hogan's godmother when she was born.

Soon after, Anderson moved away to earn her bachelor's degree, ending up at St. Louis' Washington University, where she earned her master's in social work in 1961. While Hogan grew up in Wisconsin, her godmother worked in crisis intervention in the roughest parts of St. Louis. Anderson visited the Hogans about once a year.

Anderson never married, nor had children herself. But when she met a child or any person she liked, she bonded strongly with them. Her goddaughter was certainly in that circle. Years after the accident, Hogan remarried, had two more children and adopted a child with special needs. Anderson visited the kids, sent them gifts and wrote their mother the weekly letters.

She worked as a social worker in the St. Louis area for more than 50 years, and when my husband hired her more than a decade ago, she developed an affection for our children. Every Easter, Halloween and Christmas, packages would arrive for both of them from her.

We were hardly alone as recipients of her generosity.

If she was at a garage sale or in the senior center and spotted something one of her clients or "adopted" children would like, she bought it and sent it. One of the children she counseled early in her career, when he was 10 years old, stayed in her life for more than 40 years. When she had to move from her home in the city to an assisted living center, he took the bus across town to her home to help her pack and move.

As she got older, the osteoarthritis in her back got so bad that she hunched over and pushed the seat of her walker, instead of the handles, to get around. But she continued to work and was devoted to her clients. She would find out which candies the youngest ones liked and keep their favorites on hand.

It was always a mystery to me why a woman so vivacious, with such a generous soul, beautiful through and through, never married or had a family of her own. When I asked Hogan if she knew why Anderson never had children, she said: I'm going to assume I was hers.

Perhaps Anderson figured out that loving people didn't require anything more than a giving heart.

"She saw the world as her oyster, and it presented pearls to her in the form of other people," said Pat Way, Anderson's longtime friend. When Way saw her in a hospital bed, in septic shock from an infection the day before she died, the first thing her friend said was, "You better call Betty and tell her I may not be in tomorrow." She was worried about seeing her clients the next day.

Hogan said she cried for 24 hours after she learned of Anderson's death on Jan. 2. She thought of her father, whom she had adored and who died when she was 15, meeting Anderson in heaven.

"I imagined him thanking her for taking care of me."

At home, there's an unfinished letter Hogan had been writing to her godmother that never got mailed.