Growth has been a hot topic among education policy wonks for years, and last year 48 states and the District of Columbia opted to include growth data in their accountability systems under the Every Student Succeeds Act. It's exciting that a broad commitment to measuring individual student growth is happening across the country, yet states are using a variety of different methods to calculate it — and not all growth measures are created equal.
What is growth data? It looks beyond measures of performance at a moment in time, like a single test score, and instead use a student's assessment data over time to evaluate that child's academic progress. Every child should be making progress in school year after year, and growth data provides critical insight into whether that's actually happening.
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