Are Missouri students growing? Growth model provides a different perspective

Ten percent of students at Lexington Elementary in St. Louis Public Schools were proficient in mathematics in 2025. However, Lexington was one of the highest growth elementary schools in the entire state of Missouri, ranking 16th overall (kali9/Getty Images).

Many parents and educators are concerned about standardized test scores released recently by the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, and rightly so.

Less than half of students in Missouri are proficient in math or English language arts. The numbers are even lower for subgroups; only 1 in 4 students who are black, Hispanic, English learners, or special education students scored proficient or advanced in either subject last school year.

But what we’re looking at the numbers all wrong? What if proficiency isn’t the best measurement of student progress?

What we really want to know is if students are growing from year to year, and by how much. No one takes their child to the pediatrician for their annual physical and measures a child’s growth based on how tall they’ve grown since birth. Likewise, we should gauge student progress by assessing their improvement from one school year to the next.

That’s where the Missouri Growth Model comes in. As parents, educators and policymakers mark the midpoint of the school year, it’s important to make sure we’re evaluating student progress by the best standards.

Education researchers like the team I work with at the PRiME Center at Saint Louis University consider the Missouri Growth Model a “regression” – a technique that uses the previous year’s test scores to predict how much students will grow. This model then calculates how much growth happened relative to the predicted score.

Parents can think of it this way. Say there are two students, Johnny and Jane, who take the MAP test in third and fourth grade. Jane scores a 300 in third grade and a 370 in fourth grade, seeing an increase in her score of 70 points. Johnny scores a 390 in third Grade and a 390 again in fourth grade. Growth says that Jane had the better year, celebrating the immense progress made between third and fourth grade.

And if it’s true for students, it’s true for schools.

Ten percent of students at Lexington Elementary in St. Louis Public Schools were proficient in mathematics in 2025. However, Lexington was one of the highest growth elementary schools in the entire state of Missouri, ranking 16th overall.

Using growth figures over proficiency accomplishes three things. First, it allows us to see progress over the span of one school year, rather than a measure of all accumulated knowledge. Growth uses previous year’s test scores to account for where a student starts the year and is therefore able to isolate the impact a school had on a student’s growth year to year.

Second, growth rewards movement in the upward direction, regardless of movement across proficiency thresholds. The Missouri Growth Model puts the focus on moving students along a continuum, regardless of where along that continuum they started and ended the year.

And third, growth compares students to themselves – not another group of students. Proficiency doesn’t account for an influx of students year to year but rather, say, compares this year’s fourth graders to last year’s fourth graders; growth compares students to their own individual past performance.

Unlike proficiency, growth is not correlated with household income. Every student can grow, no matter what their proficiency scores are.

Why are proficiency standards and test scores used more widely than growth? People like the proficiency method because it’s simple to understand. But that simplicity also makes it unfair to students, schools and districts who start the school year in different places. Proficiency cannot account for that, but growth does.

Some may say that the goal is for students to achieve proficiency so they can be well positioned for success later in life. However, simply moving a child from “below basic” on a standardized test score to “basic,” which is not recognized by traditional proficiency metrics, can increase their chances of graduating high school by 25 percent. Isn’t that something to celebrate?

Yes, we want students to become proficient. But the only way to accomplish that is to grow them. We must recognize, reward and replicate the incredible gains our students are making.