ABOUT
A CALL TO ACTION: ALL STUDENTS DESERVE THE OPPORTUNITY TO SUCCEED AT GRADE LEVEL OR ABOVE!
The 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress — the Nation's Report Card, released in January 2025 — tells a brutal story. Of the twenty-six largest urban school districts that participated in the Trial Urban District Assessment (TUDA), the bottom of the table reads like a roll call of America's predominantly Black and Latino cities. Detroit. Cleveland. Milwaukee. Baltimore. Philadelphia. Memphis.
In Detroit Public Schools Community District, only five percent of fourth-graders read at or above NAEP Proficient. Only seven percent are proficient in mathematics. In Cleveland, the numbers are eight and nine. In Milwaukee, nine and twelve. These are not statistical anomalies — they are the steady-state output of districts where the average Black or Latino child has been taught below grade level, in slow pacing, with no immediate feedback, for every year of their schooling.
ALL STUDENTS MUST SUCCEED AT GRADE LEVEL
Sixty years of education research converge on a single insight. Children move to grade level fastest when the adults closest to them are part of the learning, and when those children are taught at or above grade level rather than remediated below it. Lev Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development establishes that learners advance most when challenged just beyond their current independent capacity with appropriate scaffolding. Jeanne Chall's research demonstrates that students taught at grade level or above achieve significantly stronger literacy outcomes than students remediated below it. The principle of rightful presence, that every child belongs in grade-level instruction regardless of where they begin, is the operating discipline that turns these insights into school-level practice.
ED-TECH Leverages AI to Keep Students Succeeding at Grade Level & At Home with Parents or At School!
ED-TECH Enterprises operationalizes this research:
• Through Executive Principal Coaching, we develop the principals who run buildings as proficiency operations and use software-derived data to drive what must happen in every classroom.
• Through The Executive Principal Institute, we equip principals to deploy multilingual AI software so every learner accesses grade-level rigor, and to inspect what they expect through disciplined walkthroughs, evidence-based feedback, and progress monitoring.
• Through AI Credentials, we certify teachers, administrators, students, and parents as ethical and effective users of artificial intelligence as an academic accelerator.
• Through the SDP AI Toolkit, we deliver Philadelphia-customized AI tools, including a multilingual family coaching companion, that put grade-level practice into every home, with usage data feeding the District's MTSS decision-making.