You open the score report, and there it is: one number that seems to say whether your child is doing fine or falling behind. For years, that single proficiency cut-score has done most of the talking in American schools, and it sounds like a verdict. On September 15, Delaware started telling a second story about the same students. For the first time, the state released its DSSF Growth Index as a distinct line, measuring how far each child moved toward a target set from their own prior-year score, not whether they cleared one fixed bar. That distinction matters more than it sounds, because a snapshot and a journey are not the same thing.
School score reports are landing, and a lot of parents are staring at one number wondering what it means. Here are the questions parents are actually asking.
Common questions
What is the difference between a proficiency score and a growth score?
My child scored below proficient. Should I panic?
Does a low test score mean my child has a learning difference like dyslexia?
What should I ask my child’s school about test results?
Delaware now reports how far students move toward their own targets, not only whether they clear one bar. Its lowest scorers moved farthest. A score is a snapshot, not a verdict on your child.
What Delaware actually released
The Delaware Department of Education released the 2026 DSSF Academic Progress results, its Growth Index, on September 15, covering students in grades 4 through 8 in English language arts and mathematics for the 2025–26 school year. By the department’s own account this is the first time it has released the statewide Growth Index as a distinct part of its annual assessment and accountability rollout. The index measures the average share of each student’s personalized growth target achieved, a target set from that child’s own prior-year score. Statewide, the averages came in at 59.3% in ELA and 57.55% in math.
The department put the figure in plain terms. “Put another way, if each student’s individual growth target were a 100-mile journey, students statewide traveled about 59 miles toward their ELA targets and 58 miles toward their math targets, on average.” The most striking result was who moved the most. Students who started with the lowest prior-year scores achieved a greater share of their targets, roughly 67% in ELA and 63% in math, than the statewide average did. “Delaware students are moving,” said Cindy Marten, Secretary of Education, “and on average students who started with the lowest scores are moving farther toward their growth targets than students statewide.”
The growth release follows a proficiency release the month before, and the two belong to the same rollout as different measures of the same children. On August 18 the state reported statewide proficiency for grades 3 through 8 at 42% in ELA and 35% in math, each up about a point from the prior year, with math rising for four straight years. Marten was careful not to oversell it then either. “A one-percentage point statewide increase is not the win,” she said.
Delaware students are moving, and on average students who started with the lowest scores are moving farther toward their growth targets than students statewide.
Laura Lurns · Learning Success expert
Why a snapshot was never the whole story
For as long as most parents have been alive, one number has done the talking on a school report: the proficiency score, the line a child is either above or below. It reads like a verdict. Proficient or not. On track or behind. The trouble with a fixed line is that it tells you where a child stood on one morning of one year, and says nothing about which direction they are heading or how far they have come. Treating that snapshot as destiny is the quiet mistake underneath a lot of anxious kitchen-table conversations, and it is the frame Delaware’s second number gently breaks.
The science of learning has never been comfortable with the verdict reading. Brain-imaging work on children in reading intervention points in one direction: with the right kind of teaching, the brain shifts how it goes about the task. That evidence is narrower than the headlines around it, drawn from reading intervention specifically, and a careful review of those studies found they do not all converge. So hold it as direction, not proof. The honest version is the one worth keeping: the brain you are worried about today is not the brain your child will have in six months of the right kind of effort. Brains change with what they practice.
There is a second body of research that rhymes with what Delaware found, and it has to be handled with care. When children are taught that ability grows with effort rather than being fixed, the research on those programs points toward a small average effect and a somewhat larger one for the students who were struggling most. That literature is genuinely disputed, with well-run reviews in the same year reaching different conclusions, so nobody should call it settled. And it is a resonance, not a proof: those studies measure what happens when you teach a child to believe ability grows, while Delaware’s Growth Index measures actual movement on a test against a personalized target. They are not the same mechanism, and the mindset research is not evidence that Delaware’s metric works. What is worth noticing is only that both point the same way, toward the child who starts furthest back having the most room to move. If the language of growth is new at home, our free growth-mindset program for parents walks through the effort language some families use with a struggling child.
Key takeaways
- A snapshot became a journey: Delaware now reports how far students moved toward their own targets, not only where they landed.
- Lowest scorers moved farthest: Students who started with the lowest scores cleared a greater share of their growth targets than the average.
- Read it with care: The growth index is brand new, with no track record and target math nobody could independently verify.
What to do with a number that worries you
So what does a parent do with two numbers instead of one? Start by refusing to read either as a destiny. A proficiency score tells you where your child stands against a fixed bar this year. A growth number tells you how far they moved toward a target set from their own starting point. Both are snapshots. Neither is a verdict, and the second one is often the more hopeful of the two, because it credits a child who is climbing hard even while still below the line.
This is where a growth measure both helps and misleads, and it pays to understand the difference the way you would with any screening a school hands you. It helps when it catches a child who is below the bar but moving, a child the old report would have written off. It misleads if you treat one year’s number as proof of anything on its own. This is the first year Delaware has published this index as its own line, so there is no track record yet showing what it changes. And the finding that the lowest starters moved farthest, encouraging as it is, could partly reflect how growth targets are built, since a smaller climb in raw points sometimes clears a larger share of a personalized target. The state’s own technical report on that math was not something we were able to open and check, so read the number as a useful new lens, not a settled truth.
For your own child, the more useful move is to ask the school for growth over time rather than one score in isolation. Ask what your child’s target was and how far they moved toward it. And if a low number has you worried that something specific is making reading or math harder than it should be, a free reading screener is a low-cost place to begin; it asks what you are seeing at home and points you toward where to start. A screener is a starting point, not a diagnosis. If your child might need formal accommodations such as an IEP or 504 plan, or you suspect a vision, hearing, or medical cause, pursue a professional evaluation too, since that is the only route to those supports. A single score never knew your child. It knew one morning. The direction they are heading, and the effort you build around them, is the part no fixed line has ever been able to measure.
Put another way, if each student’s individual growth target were a 100-mile journey, students statewide traveled about 59 miles toward their ELA targets and 58 miles toward their math targets, on average.
Laura Lurns · Learning Success expert
Your child is more than a line on a score report, and you are the person best placed to see the movement a single number hides. The villain here is not a test, and it is not a state doing the honest work of measuring growth. It is the old habit of treating one cut-score as a verdict, a fixed label handed to a child who is still in motion. Learning Success was built on the opposite belief, that skills are built through practice with you in the room and that a diagnosis describes where a child is today, not where they will be after a year of the right kind of work. Our All-Access membership opens an assessment that asks about the systems your child’s learning runs on, and a roadmap that names what to build first.
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A screener is a starting point, not a diagnosis. If your child might need formal accommodations (an IEP or 504 plan), or you suspect a vision, hearing or medical cause, pursue a professional evaluation too. That is the only route to those supports.
References
- Delaware Department of Education — Delaware Releases 2026 DSSF Academic Progress Results
- Delaware Department of Education — Delaware schools receiving targeted literacy support show some of the state’s strongest assessment gains
- Delaware Department of Education — Measuring School Performance (DSSF metric areas)
- Delaware Open Data — Student Growth (school-level growth data)
