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 subscribing to the Student Success System
- 100+
- Schools subscribing to the Student Success System
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 and a disciplined way to know whether the response was actually working. What had been tried before? What had changed? Was David making progress? If years of intervention had produced little change, should the explanation of the problem or 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 work with schools.
What began with assessment expanded as educators showed us that seeing a student clearly was only the beginning. Schools needed to understand progress over time, investigate more deeply when a broad result was not enough, connect what they learned with curriculum and teaching, and establish dependable ways to decide what happens next.
They also showed us how easily important understanding can remain fragmented. One teacher may see a strength another never encounters. A specialist may understand a difficulty that is less visible in the classroom. An intervention may continue without a clear account of whether the student is becoming more capable. Students already succeeding may receive less attention to whether they are continuing to grow.
Those experiences shaped the larger work behind True Progress: knowing every student deeply, connecting evidence with professional judgment, acting on what the school learns, and returning to the student’s progress and experience to understand whether the response is helping.
The technology was designed around the same principle. Assessments should be brief, reliable, and easy to use. Information should be available quickly. The technology should support educators’ work without becoming the work.
That process continues today. The questions, decisions, and experiences of schools using True Progress continue to shape the system, the research, and the practical guidance we develop.
TRUE PROGRESS TODAY
Visibility was the beginning
Our first work focused on Visibility: helping schools develop a clear, current understanding of every student, from schoolwide patterns to the learning and experience of an individual child.
Working alongside schools revealed the larger challenge. Seeing clearly raises the next questions. What does this student actually need? What should the school do differently? How should curriculum, teaching, intervention, or challenge respond? And after acting, how will the school know whether the response helped?
That work grew into the True Progress Student Success System.
The system connects five drivers — Visibility, Focused Curriculum, Instruction, Meaningful Data, and Workflows — so that understanding leads to purposeful action and schools return to what students learn and experience next.
Today, True Progress also studies the consequential problems affecting student learning and success. We turn that work into research briefings, practical frameworks, assessment technology, professional learning, implementation guidance, and coaching for schools.
Visibility was the beginning. The larger work is helping schools know every student deeply enough to act well and keep learning from what follows.
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:
Know every student deeply. Know whether progress is happening. Know what to do next.
That is True Progress.