TNTP’s New Report Highlights How 1,300 Schools Across the Nation Are Getting Students Back on Grade Level

NEW YORK – Today, TNTP released The Opportunity Makers: How a Diverse Group of Public Schools Helps Students Catch Up—and How Far More Can. In the report, the national education nonprofit identifies three common qualities found in 1,300 trajectory-changing elementary and middle schools across the nation that have achieved exceptional results for students who started below grade level.

“Five percent of the schools we studied bucked national trends by averaging 1.3 years of student learning each year. That remarkable rate of growth equates to a full extra year of learning in a three-year period,” says Dr. Tequilla Brownie, CEO of TNTP. “A solid academic foundation is the first step to unlocking economic and social mobility for all young people, and these schools are showing the way.”

The typical approach to school improvement often has schools swinging from one initiative to the next or layering each new program onto the last, asking educators to do more and more. But the three focus areas and practices identified in the report are a way for schools to simplify. The research found that the trajectory-changing schools prioritize three core things:

1) Belonging: They create an emotional climate for learning that activates students’ ability to excel.

2) Consistency: They consistently deliver good teaching and grade-level content for all students.

3) Coherence: They build a unified instructional program and set priorities that are clear to all.

The Opportunity Makers provides a deep-dive into seven of the 1,300 schools to showcase specific and tangible examples of how they implement the three focus areas on their campuses. Alongside the report, TNTP published free tools and resources to help educators, school leaders, and other stakeholders adapt trajectory-changing best practices.

“Our students are still recovering from the academic devastation of the pandemic—and too many students were behind grade level even before COVID,” says Joanne Weiss, President of Weiss Associates and Expert-in-Residence at the Harvard Innovation Lab. “There are no easy, one-step solutions, but the good news is that there are multi-pronged solutions and TNTP has identified them in this report. And, better yet, the solutions are replicable and scalable.”

For more information, visit tntp.org.

TNTP is a national education nonprofit that brings research, policy, and consulting together to reimagine America’s public education system. Reaching over 40 percent of young people across the nation, TNTP envisions a PK–12 experience for every student that upends the predictive influence of poverty and race on their life outcomes and fuels innovation and growth across the country.

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