Schools Earn High Marks for Growth in New PRiME Center Report
Published On: January 24, 2025
Dozens of Missouri schools have been recognized as the state’s “highest growth schools” in a series of new rankings from the PRiME Center at Saint Louis University. These schools are being highlighted for the significant educational gains their students made over the last two school years.
The “best” schools are usually thought to be those with the highest test scores or proficiency rates. But education researchers at the Policy Research in Missouri Education (PRiME) Center said that’s not necessarily the most effective way to evaluate school performance.
In the new “Missouri Statewide Growth Report,” schools are ranked according to the progress students made from one school year to the next. The dozens of schools highlighted in the report’s Top 20 lists saw “tremendous growth” in student academic performance. The report is available online here.
“The No. 1 job of educators is to meet students where they’re at, and then spend every day helping each individual student reach his or her full, personal potential for that particular school year,” said Collin Hitt, executive director of the PRiME Center. “That’s why measuring growth is so important. In the ‘Growth Report’ rankings, we highlight, we applaud, and we celebrate Missouri’s highest growth schools. These are the places where educators and parents are working together to help students make significant strides in a single school year.”
Many of the schools ranked in the Top 20 lists are considered “low performing” when measured according to proficiency rates or standardize test scores. Some schools have high populations of students living in poverty, students who are homeless, English language learners, or who have special needs. These rankings illustrate how important it is to consider the progress that students can make in a single school year, even in the face of challenging circumstances.
“A single standardized test score does not tell you how much a student learned in any given school year. It does not tell you if that student made any educational gains since the last test, or if that student is learning anything new,” Hitt said. “No matter where students started the school year, the schools highlighted in this report are the places where they have the greatest potential to grow.”
The rankings are based on MAP scores in English Language Arts and Mathematics for students in grades 3 through 8. To compile the rankings, researchers evaluated test scores for the 2022-23 and 2023-24 school years for more than 1,600 schools across 552 districts in Missouri.
The content of this blog post was adapted from the 4th Edition of our annual Missouri Growth Report. Read more about Growth measures here.
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