Every school promises your child will grow. The Civic School measures it with SCOPE™, our founder-developed framework and assessment for seeing social and cognitive growth, and with nationally normed academic benchmarks from our very first semester.
SCOPE™ is an assessment framework developed by Dr. Danielle Bryant, grounded in the developmental research and social-emotional learning literature, built for real classrooms. It observes and describes children’s growth across seven domains.
Most schools describe these things in abstractions: “grit,” “SEL,” “the whole child.” SCOPE™ is different because it is built around observable behavior and real student language at each stage of development: what growth actually looks and sounds like from first grade and beyond.
SCOPE™ is an assessment your child will take three times a year — fall, winter, and spring — building, cycle by cycle, into a portrait of who your child is becoming.
Visit the SCOPE™ website to learn more →SCOPE™’s scoring intentionally leaves out a composite number but instead sets a profile for your child’s areas for growth and proficiency. Reducing a child to a single number obscures exactly the specificity that makes assessment useful: a child can be advanced in communication while still developing in conflict resolution, and the teaching should meet each of those precisely. What you’ll see is where your child is in each domain, with the evidence to show for it.
Naming, expressing, and steadying one’s own emotions — the foundation every other domain rests on.
Recognizing how others feel, understanding viewpoints beyond one’s own, and responding with kindness.
Expressing needs and ideas, listening well, and holding up one’s end of a real conversation.
Sharing, taking turns, and pulling together in play and project work — a daily working condition here, not a soft skill.
Resolving disagreements calmly, generating options, and finding fair solutions. Conflict is the test of community — we teach the repair.
Knowing one’s strengths, setting goals, and treating mistakes as information — measured in behavior, not recited slogans.
Weighing consequences for self and others, and reasoning from fairness, honesty, and responsibility. In an AI age, choosing well is a core academic competency.
Together they are the Portrait of a Graduate made measurable and help build our daily practices of asking, participating, making, and belonging, tracked as your child actually lives it.
Each report shows your child’s current level in every domain, three to five quotes of observed behavior or actual student language as evidence, and one or two specific things to practice at home per domain.
You will never get a vague “meets expectations.” You’ll get what your child said, what your child did, and what it means — plainly.