Great teachers and strong school leaders are the foundation of a high-quality K–12 public education. To ensure every student has a fair shot at success, we must invest in effective leaders, schools, and systems. At RedefinED Atlanta, this investment looks like:
- expanding access to impactful public schools, including place-based solutions like DC360;
- advancing system-level solutions with partners like The Center for Learner Equity, which allows us to identify and close gaps for students with learning differences;
- building a durable educator pipeline through partnerships with Relay Graduate School of Education, TFA Metro Atlanta, BES and GCSA;
- making sure schools and systems have the data, feedback, and support needed to improve teaching and learning.
Our continued work with the TNTP Instructional Culture Insight Surveys goes hand-in-hand with our new partnership with ANet, both of which provide teachers and school leaders with the data they need to identify strengths and areas for improvement, as well as a community of support to implement effective interventions.
ANet specifically fills a long-standing gap in Metro Atlanta around preparing teachers, and, ultimately, students for state standardized testing. Through RedefinED Atlanta’s partnership with ANet, we’ve built rigorous and meaningful GMAS aligned assessments, which are administered twice each school year and help teachers identify and address knowledge gaps before they become long-standing learning gaps. It is not about teaching to a test, but about discovering where students are struggling so teachers can intervene sooner and prevent students from falling behind. It is also different from tests like MAP and STAR, which have different performance measures and thus cannot predict performance on the Georgia Milestones test.
We were excited to launch our first cohort of 18 schools, with the first exam administered in the Fall of 2025 and the second administered in the Spring of 2026. We then gathered school leaders from each school at Upstairs Atlanta for our ANet Benchmark #2 Convening, focused on ELA analysis in grades 3 and 6, where we focused on turning assessment data into purposeful instructional action that can change student trajectories.
Together, we dug into the results to identify priority standards, analyze student work, and name targeted moves to strengthen core instruction. Teams aligned on where students are demonstrating mastery, where misconceptions persist, and how to adjust instruction to ensure greater access to grade-level texts and tasks.
Beyond analysis, the convening created space for collaboration across schools. Leaders shared strategies, reflected on effective practices, and committed to clear next steps to accelerate reading, writing, and comprehension growth in the months ahead.
As always, we had fun and stayed grounded in what matters most: ensuring more students are on track for long-term literacy success. While we don’t have the data yet to prove year-over-year growth, I am optimistic that we’ll see significant improvement in Milestones scores for earnestly participating schools. I’ve also heard from participating schools that they want to keep growing and expanding the opportunities that ANet presents. In response, we are looking into not just how we can include more schools in future cohorts, but also how we can use this opportunity to better support special education efforts. Stay tuned for exciting updates this fall!