OUR FIRM
Built alongside schools that want every student to move forward
For fifteen years, True Progress has worked with schools committed to understanding students deeply, making progress visible, and helping educators know what to do next.
- Years building with schools
- 15 YEARS
- Building True Progress with schools
- Schools using True Progress
- 100+
- Schools using True Progress
WHERE THE WORK BEGAN
Eleven years without progress
For eleven years, across five independent schools, True Progress founder David Stevens received almost every kind of academic help a struggling student could receive: evaluations, reading intervention, after-school tutoring, specialized programs, and summer school year after year.
His parents followed the recommendations. His schools provided the help. And very little changed.
Each new school year brought a new teacher, a new evaluation, or a new team looking at the situation in front of them. The recommendations were often remarkably similar to what had come before. More tutoring. More intervention. Another summer program.
Then the same discouraging results.
What was missing was continuity. What had been tried before? Had it worked? Was David making progress? If years of intervention had produced little change, should the response itself change?
In eleventh grade, David was referred to a reading center at George Washington University. They tried something different. It worked. Within a year, his academic trajectory changed.
After college, David returned to the same center to work with students from schools much like the ones he had attended. The experience that had shaped his own education became a question that would shape his professional life:
How do we know whether what we’re doing for a student is actually working?
THE WORK BEHIND TRUE PROGRESS
From student experience to a system for schools
Working directly with students led David deeper into questions of learning, cognitive development, assessment, and learning differences. That work continued in educational technology: tools meant to turn what we know about learning into something educators can use.
Across those settings the same problem kept appearing. Schools could accumulate enormous amounts of information about a student and still have little visibility into whether that student was making meaningful progress.
That work led to True Progress.
BUILT WITH SCHOOLS
Fifteen years of learning alongside educators
True Progress has been built through fifteen years of use in schools.
What began with assessment expanded as educators showed us what they needed around the assessment: clearer visibility into where students were thriving and struggling, better ways to see progress over time, deeper information when a screener was not enough, professional development grounded in their own student data, and practical workflows for deciding what happens next.
Schools also taught us something about the technology itself. It needs to be quick, simple, reliable, and easy to use. Educators should spend their time with students, not learning software or managing complicated systems. Instructional time is too valuable for lengthy implementations, unnecessary testing, or technology that creates more work.
That understanding has shaped how we build True Progress: short assessments, straightforward workflows, useful information delivered quickly, and technology that stays in the background.
The relationship between educator and student remains at the center. True Progress provides the tools around that relationship — helping educators see more clearly, make informed decisions, and keep their time and attention where they matter most.
That process continues today. The questions, decisions, and experiences of the schools using True Progress continue to shape what we build.
TRUE PROGRESS TODAY
Visibility was the beginning
Our first work focused on visibility: giving schools a clear, current view of every student, from schoolwide patterns to an in-depth understanding of an individual learner.
Over time, working alongside schools revealed the larger challenge. Once educators could see clearly, they needed a way to organize what happened next. Which students needed attention? What should that attention focus on? What should the school do differently? And after acting, was it working?
In partnership with schools, that work grew into the True Progress Student Success System.
The system brings together five drivers of student success — Visibility, Focused Curriculum, Instruction, Meaningful Data, and Workflows — to help schools turn deep student understanding into clear priorities and coordinated action, then return to the evidence to see whether that action is producing meaningful progress.
Visibility makes every student clearer. The Student Success System helps schools act on what they see.
TRUE PROGRESS SCHOOLS
Different schools. A shared commitment to every student.
True Progress Schools are not defined by governance. They are defined by an expectation: every student seen clearly, progress visible, and a change in the work when progress is not happening.
Independent schools, charter schools, and public districts on True Progress share that expectation.
FOUNDER
David Stevens, Ed.D.
Founder, True Progress
David Stevens has spent thirty-five years working with students and developing approaches to learning, assessment, and educational technology.
After beginning his career working directly with students who learn differently, he earned his master’s and doctorate from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where his work focused on cognitive development and the transfer of learning.
He founded True Progress to help schools know every student deeply: how they learn, where they are thriving, where they need something different, and what they need next. Above all, he founded it to answer the question that had shaped his own experience: How do we know whether what we are doing for a student is actually working?
That question, first encountered as a student, continues to guide the work today. People who want to contribute to it are welcome to learn about opportunities at True Progress.
OUR CONVICTION
Know every student. Know what to do next.
Fifteen years alongside schools have led us to a simple conviction:
We help schools know every student clearly, know whether progress is happening, and know what to do next.
That is the work behind True Progress.