Everything in the Student Success System begins with visibility. You cannot stretch a student you haven’t noticed is coasting. You cannot help one whose struggle hasn’t surfaced yet. And you cannot know whether your support is working if you cannot see the progress.
The pilot is where your school experiences that first driver directly — not in a demonstration, not in a case study, but with your own students, in your own building, over a single trimester.
Three months. One testing window, or two. A grade level, a division, or your whole school. At the end, you’ll know something no sales conversation could tell you: whether your school sees its children more clearly than it did before.
What the pilot is
It’s the real thing, at real scale. Not a trial version. Your students, your classrooms, your data — the full platform, running the way it would run if you adopted it tomorrow.
It’s short enough to fit inside a school year. Three months means you can start in September and know by December. Or start in January and know by spring. You are not committing your school to a year-long experiment before you learn anything.
It fits your calendar, not ours. Students take the screener in a normal class period. About 25 minutes for math, about 25 for ELA. No testing week. No closing the library. No rearranged schedule.
You choose the scale. Some schools pilot a single grade level. Some pilot a division. Some pilot a small reading group. Some pilot the whole school. We’ll tell you honestly what each choice will reveal and what it won’t — a small group shows you the platform, but a full cohort shows you the range, and the range is usually the finding that matters.
It runs alongside what you already have. Most schools keep their ERBs, their DIBELS, their curriculum assessments running right through the pilot. Nothing has to be replaced before you know what you’d be replacing it with.
And you control the communication. Your school decides what is shared, with whom, and when — including what goes to families and on what timeline. We’ll advise you based on how a hundred peer schools have handled it, and we’ll help your faculty build the language for those conversations. But the plan is yours.
Visibility: what the pilot actually delivers
The pilot has one job: to make your students visible. Here is what that means concretely.
Every student’s level, in the first week. A percentile, a scale score, and a grade-level equivalent for every child — not months later, but the same day they test. Your teachers can see where their class stands and start planning immediately.
The range inside each classroom. This is what most schools have never been able to see. In a single room, you have students working well above your curriculum and students working well below it, and the distance between them is often larger than anyone has quantified. The pilot makes that spread visible for the first time.
Who is quietly slipping. Nearly every pilot surfaces at least one student the school didn’t know to worry about — and just as often, it confirms a concern a teacher has carried for months without evidence to bring to anyone.
Who has outgrown the work. Most schools come to us thinking about students who struggle. The pilot reveals the other end: capable students who are no longer being reached, whose scores will slide if no one notices. For schools under family pressure about intellectual challenge, this is often the finding that matters most.
What’s actually behind a score. Click into any student’s assessment and you can see all thirty questions — how far the test adapted, where the student was successful, how long they spent, what they skipped. A percentile becomes something a teacher can act on.
How your students engage with assessment. You’ll see the child who finishes in eight minutes and skips every reading passage. That isn’t a failure of the test. It’s a finding — and one your team can respond to.
How the pilot runs
First: designing your workflow
Before any student takes an assessment, we meet with your leadership team for one or two working sessions. This is the step most schools have never been offered by a vendor, and it’s the one that determines whether the pilot succeeds.
We don’t begin by training your teachers. We begin by helping you decide how the data will be used in your school. When a student scores in the red, is that the classroom teacher’s responsibility, or does it go to student support? Who gives a diagnostic, and when? What should a teacher do about the students who are thriving? These are your decisions — but we’ve helped over a hundred independent schools make them, and we’ll show you how peer schools have answered.
What comes out of these sessions is your workflow: if this, then that. That’s what makes the faculty training simple, and it’s what prevents the anxiety that comes from ambiguity.
We also calibrate your color bands together — deciding what thriving, on level, watch, and concern mean at your school, against a peer group that resembles you rather than a national average that doesn’t.
Then: a 45-minute faculty session
A short Zoom with every teacher who will administer the assessment. How to help students sign in, how to proctor, how to support a student who needs it, and how to see their own results. That’s all it needs to be, because the hard thinking was already done with your leadership.
We frame this to faculty as what it is: we’re evaluating something, and we need your input on whether it’s useful. Teachers respond to being asked rather than told.
Your first testing window
Students test in a normal class period. Results are immediate — you can meet at the end of the day and see where an entire grade stands.
We keep the first round deliberately low-stakes. For your youngest students especially, the first administration is partly practice, and we’ll tell you plainly which data to trust and which to hold loosely.
Reading the data together
Once everyone has tested, we run a second 45-minute session with your faculty — this time looking at your students. We show teachers what to look at, what to ignore, and how to think about what they’re seeing. We set the tone for how your school will talk about this data: not pass-fail, not at-risk, not anything alienating. Information that helps you see who needs something different.
Most teachers leave this session with the same realization: the vast majority of their students are thriving, and the assessment’s real job was finding the two or three who need a closer look.
Going deeper where it matters
With the screener data in hand, you use the diagnostic where you want to know what a student specifically needs, and the inventory for the students whose profiles don’t fit a single grade level. You use as much or as little as is useful. Most students need nothing beyond the screener — that’s the point.
If your window allows, a second screener before the pilot ends begins to show you something the first one couldn’t: movement.
Deciding what’s next
At the end of three months, you have your own students in your own data, a faculty who understands what they’re looking at, and a leadership team that has seen the range in its classrooms.
From there you’ll know what you want — the right scale, the right rhythm, how it fits alongside what you already use, and when your community is ready to hear about it. You’ll know because you’ll have lived it, not because we told you.
Getting started
It begins with a conversation. We’ll talk about your students, what you’re using now, what you wish you could see, and what a pilot would look like at your school specifically — which grades, what scale, what rhythm, and how it sits alongside what you already have.
From there we map the workflow with your leadership, set the calendar, and run the faculty session before your first window. Most schools go from first conversation to first assessment within a few weeks.
No long implementation. No data migration. No reorganizing your school around us.