New York state's Rochester City School District faces many of the same challenges as other large urban school districts nationwide--including high student mobility, large numbers of students from single-parent and non-English-speaking families, and pervasive poverty. The district has 34,000 preK-12 students and 15,000 adult students in continuing-education programs, with 3,600 teachers scattered across 39 elementary schools, 19 secondary schools, and several alternative education programs. At the same time, it is subject to increased requirements for accountability, despite its limited resources.

The district's primary focus is on driving instruction through an informed process. To better establish the needs of children at a certain point in time and then use that information to guide the delivery of instruction, the district needed a real-time solution for assessment and evaluation.

School officials knew that meeting these diverse challenges would require a comprehensive, robust solution, one that optimizes resource allocation. To choose such a product, the district conducted a thorough evaluation of formative assessment solutions. RFPs were issued to providers of educational assessment services, and head-to-head comparisons were performed. Individual schools sent teachers and administrators to a demonstration and review of each product.

Acuity makes the grade

Rochester ultimately selected Acuity, CTB-McGraw-Hill's flagship suite of classroom assessment tools. Acuity is an integrated set of predictive and diagnostic benchmark assessments, with reports that provide the data that classroom teachers need to make real improvements in student performance. Acuity was designed to be classroom-friendly, with both online and paper-and-pencil administration options. Acuity has five integrated components:

• • Predictive benchmarks that model individual states' NCLB test blueprints;
• • Diagnostic assessments that align with each district's pacing guide;
• • Targeted reports, available immediately after testing;
• • Online instructional exercises that provide extra practice; and
• • A state-correlated test item bank, for giving teacher-created tests.