Student Success
Why Independent Schools Choose True Progress
Independent schools have their pick of assessment tools. Most were built for large public districts and adapted, reluctantly, for everyone else. They measure students against a national average that means little in a school where the average child is already well ahead of it. They produce a score and leave the school to figure out the rest.
True Progress was built for independent schools specifically — for the particular challenge of teaching a classroom where students span an enormous range, where families are sophisticated and expect answers, and where every child is meant to be known individually. Schools choose True Progress for three reasons: assessments designed for their students, benchmarks that compare them to the schools they actually resemble, and a consulting partnership built on decades of work inside schools exactly like theirs.
Assessments
An assessment system built for how independent school students actually learn
The defining challenge of an independent school classroom is range. In a single room, a teacher may have students reading two grades above level sitting beside students who need genuine intervention, with a wide band of capable students in between. A student at the national 50th percentile — perfectly average nationally — may be meaningfully behind their classmates. And a sibling of a high achiever may arrive with a real learning difference that a conventional test, calibrated to a national mean, will never flag as a concern because the score still looks "fine."
True Progress is designed for exactly this. Three assessments work together, and you give each student only what they need.
Screener
Find the students who need attention
The screener takes about 25 minutes and is given to every student a few times a year. It's computer-adaptive, so it finds each student's true level quickly — adjusting up for the student who is flying and down for the student who is struggling. That keeps it short and keeps students engaged rather than defeated. In the first weeks of school, a teacher can see exactly where every child in the class stands and begin planning immediately, rather than waiting months for results from a test that closed the library for a week.
Diagnostic
Map what they need
The diagnostic follows up on the students the screener flags. Where the screener tells you who needs a closer look, the diagnostic tells you what they need — a precise map of which specific skills a student has mastered and which are gaps, so intervention targets the real problem instead of guessing at it.
Inventory
See the full profile
The inventory is for the students who don't fit a single grade level at all — the child who is on grade level in one area, a year behind in another, and years ahead in a third. It maps the full profile, finding the floor and ceiling of every skill strand. One example that recurs across our schools: a student who looked weak in math, where everyone assumed the problem was math, until the inventory revealed grade-level and advanced performance in computation and geometry and a first-grade level only on the language of math. The need wasn't a math intervention. It was language. A single summary score would have sent that child down the wrong path for a year.
Because the assessments are short, adaptive, and calibrated for students who learn differently — audio support where appropriate, the ability to start a struggling student at the right level so the experience is fair and the data is real — they capture progress that longer, one-size-fits-all tests miss entirely. Schools that leave NWEA or the ERBs for True Progress consistently report the same thing: for the first time, the assessment reflects the students they actually have.
Benchmarking
Compare your school to schools it actually resembles
This is where most assessment systems quietly fail an independent school, and it's one of the most common concerns we hear from Heads of School and academic leaders.
Families want to know how their child is doing — but not only against a national sample. They want to know how the school compares to peer independent schools, the schools they considered before choosing yours, the schools they'd consider if they left. A national percentile can't answer that. When your students cluster in the 60th, 70th, and 80th national percentiles, a national benchmark tells you almost nothing useful. Everyone looks strong. The students who are quietly slipping and the students who have outgrown the curriculum both disappear into a reassuring middle.
True Progress solves this with two layers of comparison working together.
Every score is reported against nationally normed percentiles, equated to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, so you always have a rigorous, standardized reference point. But the color categories — what counts as thriving, on-level, watch, or concern — are calibrated to your school and your independent school peer group. What "green" means at a highly selective school is different from what it means nationally, and it should be. When a student scores in the green at a school where the peer group is already advanced, that genuinely means something: this student is ahead of an already-strong cohort, and if the curriculum isn't challenging them, they may quietly regress. When a student scores in the red at the 40th national percentile — a level that would never trigger concern in a typical public school — an independent school can see that this student needs attention now, because relative to their classmates and the curriculum they're sitting in, they do.
With more than 100 independent schools on the platform, True Progress can show you where your students stand against a meaningful peer group — not an abstraction, but schools that share your challenges. It's the difference between "your students are above the national average," which tells a Head of School nothing they didn't already know, and "here is precisely where your students stand relative to schools like yours, and here is who among them needs something different." That is the comparison independent school families are actually asking for, and it's the one conventional tools can't provide.
Partnership
A consulting partnership, not a software login
This is the reason schools stay.
Data doesn't improve a school. What a school does with data improves a school — and knowing what to do is the hard part. An assessment platform that hands you a dashboard and disappears has given you a new set of numbers and the same old question: now what? True Progress is built on the opposite premise. The assessments are the instrument. The partnership is the point.
True Progress was founded by a Harvard-trained developmental psychologist whose career began in federally funded research designing and evaluating interventions for students who learn differently. The lesson of that work — that the hard problems in a school are rarely "what is wrong with this student" and almost always "what does this student need, and is what we're doing actually working" — is the foundation of everything we do. Over the years since, that expertise has been sharpened across decades of direct work inside independent schools: sitting with student support directors, curriculum coordinators, division heads, and Heads of School, in their buildings, on their real students, solving their actual problems.
That experience is what a school gains access to. It shows up in concrete ways.
We design how your school will use the data
Before a single teacher is trained, we work with your leadership to build the workflow that fits your school — what happens when a student scores in the red, who gives a diagnostic and when, which decisions belong to the classroom teacher and which belong to the support team. Faculty anxiety about data comes from ambiguity; we replace it with clarity. The result is that a data meeting ends in a decision instead of another open-ended discussion.
We bring you what works across a hundred peer schools
Because we work across the independent school world, we can tell you how comparable schools handle the challenges you're facing — the high-achieving students whose families feel they aren't being challenged, the transition from lower to middle school, the student who has been in intervention for two years without moving. When a Head of School describes the pressure families feel to accelerate their already-advanced children, we don't hear it as a novel problem. We've helped peer schools navigate exactly that, and we bring those approaches to you.
We help you have the hard conversations with families
Sophisticated parents ask hard questions, and the difference between a reassuring conference and a spiraling one is whether the school walks in with a clear picture and clear language. We help your teachers get there — so that a family sees not a confusing number, but exactly where their child is, what they're ready for, and what the school is doing next.
We build your faculty's shared understanding over time
Through professional development calibrated to your school and coaching across the year, we help your whole team develop a common language for knowing students and helping them make real progress — so that student success becomes a schoolwide practice rather than something that depends on which teacher a child happens to get.
This is why schools describe the relationship the way they do — not as a vendor they bought software from, but as a trusted partner who helps them think about their students. The tools are excellent. But what independent schools are really choosing is the judgment behind them.
Get Started
Begin with a pilot year
The best way to understand what True Progress offers is to see it work on the students you already know. Most schools begin with a low-stakes pilot year: we help you put the system in place, you see your own data more clearly than you ever have, and you decide for yourself what changes. There's no reorganizing the school calendar and no high-stakes rollout — the assessments happen in a normal class period, and the partnership begins the moment you do.
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