Strategic StudentGrowth and Achievement
Every score report answers two different questions: where is the student, and how fast are they moving? They sound like the same question. They are not even close. Most of the confusion in score conversations comes from mixing them up.
See it in one chart
Every score report holds two numbers, so put achievement on the floor and growth up the wall, and every student becomes one dot you can read in a glance: where they stand, and how fast they're moving.
Why this chart wins: every student carries two independent numbers, and a scatter is the only form that shows both at once. The commonly misused alternative is two separate bar charts, one for scores and one for growth. Split them apart and you can never see that the students who need watching sit in the lower right of this picture, the high scorers who stopped moving, not just the students on the left.
The big picture
Picture two hikers on a mountain. One is standing at 9,000 feet, taking photos. The other is at 4,000 feet, climbing hard. If you only measure altitude, the first hiker looks better. If you only measure climbing speed, the second one does. Neither number alone tells you who reaches the summit. Test scores work exactly the same way. Achievement is altitude. Growth is speed.
Schools get this wrong in both directions. A school full of high scorers can coast for years while nobody notices the students stopped climbing. A school full of low scorers can be doing the best teaching in the district and still get labeled failing, because the report card only shows altitude. And at the kitchen table, a parent sees "45th percentile" and hears "below average," when their student just had the fastest learning year of their life.
Once you can hold both numbers at once, score reports stop being scary. They become a map with a dot and an arrow: here's where we are, here's where we're headed.
The vocabulary
Eight terms cover almost everything a growth report will throw at you. Each one answers either the "where" question or the "how fast" question. Keeping track of which is which is the whole game.
Three lenses
Same two numbers, three very different jobs to do with them.
District office
Report growth and achievement together, always. School-level growth is your improvement signal, and high-achieving schools with low growth are a hidden problem your averages will never surface.
- Does every school report we publish show both numbers side by side?
- Which schools moved most on growth this year, regardless of their scores?
- Where are our high-achieving, low-growth buildings hiding?
- Are we praising altitude when we should be praising climbing?
School building
Celebrate the upper-left students loudly. They're below the bar and climbing faster than almost anyone, and they usually hear nothing but bad news. Then get curious about the classrooms where growth went quiet.
- Who are our upper-left students, and have we told them what they just did?
- What changed in the classrooms where growth dropped this year?
- Are we using AGP to set clear catch-up timelines, or just hoping?
- Which high scorers have quietly stopped growing?
Kitchen table
Two numbers, two questions. One says where your student is standing, the other says how fast they're moving. Ask for both every time, because either one alone can mislead you.
- Where is my student now, and how much did they grow this year?
- Is that growth faster or slower than students who started in the same place?
- If the percentile fell but my student grew, what pace would catch them up?
- What are we doing differently next semester to change the speed?
Where this is heading
- Through-year assessment is coming. Several states are piloting models that spread testing across the year instead of one spring event, which means growth data arrives while there's still time to act on it.
- Growth is gaining weight in accountability. More state systems now credit how fast students move, not just how many clear the bar, which changes which schools look like they're succeeding.
- AI-set growth targets need human judgment. Algorithms can project a growth path for every student in seconds. They can't know about the divorce, the new glasses, or the teacher who finally clicked. Treat projections as a starting bid, not a verdict.
- Growth measures for multilingual learners are maturing. Language proficiency growth and academic growth are different journeys on different rulers, and the field is finally starting to report them that way.
Where the free tools meet this
Sources and further reading
RAND Corporation, Student Growth Percentiles 101. Clauser, Keller, and McDermott (2016), on interpreting growth measures in school contexts. NWEA, What does RIT stand for in MAP testing?