When we opened our East Nashville tutoring and learning center, we made a promise most tutoring companies will not make: if your child does not show measurable DIBELS improvement in 12 weeks, we extend your program free.
That is a big claim, so let us be precise about what our DIBELS guarantee in Nashville actually covers. Families deserve to know exactly what they are being promised, and exactly what reading growth looks like in real life.
First: what is DIBELS?
DIBELS (Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills), developed and maintained by the University of Oregon, is a set of short, timed assessments of the specific skills that predict whether a child will become a strong reader: letter sounds, phoneme segmentation, nonsense word decoding, and oral reading fluency. Most Metro Nashville and area schools already use DIBELS or a similar benchmark, so it is likely a measure you have already seen on a report card or in a parent teacher conference.
We use DIBELS because it is objective, repeatable, and not a matter of opinion. Either the numbers move or they do not.
What our DIBELS guarantee in Nashville promises
After 90 days of consistent instruction, we expect to see raw score growth on at least one DIBELS measure. If we do not, we extend your program for a month at no charge, and we keep working until those scores move.
Two words there matter most.
Raw score. We look at your child’s actual number, whether that is words read correctly per minute, correct letter sounds, or correct phonemes, compared to their own baseline at intake. Not a percentile. Not a grade level label. Percentile ranks compare your child to a national sample that is also growing, which means a child can make real, hard won progress and still sit in the same percentile band. Raw score growth is the honest measure of whether your child learned something.
At least one measure. Reading is not a single skill. A student may make a large jump in decoding accuracy before fluency catches up, because fluency is what accuracy turns into once decoding becomes automatic. Growth almost always shows up in one strand before the others. We measure all of them and hold ourselves to movement in at least one.
What the DIBELS guarantee in Nashville is not
It is not a promise that your child will be reading on grade level in 12 weeks. It is not a promise of a specific percentile, a specific score, or a specific number of grade levels gained. Anyone who promises you that is guessing.
Structured literacy works, but it works cumulatively. A student with a significant decoding gap may need a full school year of consistent instruction to close it. Twelve weeks is enough time to prove the direction is right, that the approach is working and the trajectory has changed. That is what we are guaranteeing: evidence of movement, on schedule.
It also depends on consistent attendance. Our program is twice weekly for a reason, because skill automaticity is built through repetition and spacing. If sessions are missed regularly, the 90 day clock is not measuring our instruction anymore.
Age matters, a lot
The younger the child, the faster the numbers tend to move.
A kindergarten or first grade student is building foundational skills for the first time. There is no competing habit to undo, the skill set is smaller, and DIBELS measures at that age, like letter sound fluency and phoneme segmentation, are sensitive to short bursts of good instruction. Growth often shows up in weeks.
An older student, fourth grade and up, is doing two jobs at once: learning the code they missed, and unlearning the compensations they built to survive without it, such as guessing from context, memorizing sight words, or avoiding reading altogether. Those students almost always grow, but the early gains show up in accuracy and confidence before they show up in fluency rate.
This is the single most useful thing we can tell a parent: a slower start is not a failed start. It is what remediation looks like at age eleven.
How we track it
Our DIBELS guarantee in Nashville only works if the measurement is airtight, so every Redwood student begins with an Academic Clarity Plan, a short assessment and a written report that establishes the baseline we will measure against. From there, instructors collect progress monitoring data throughout the program, and families receive written progress reports so nothing is a surprise at week 12.
You will always know where your child stands.
Why we offer the DIBELS guarantee in Nashville
We are new here. Our East Nashville center at 1101 Chapel Avenue opens September 8, 2026, and we know that choosing a tutoring provider is an act of trust from a family that has often already been let down by a program that promised results and delivered worksheets.
So we put our own money behind the measurement. If we cannot move the number, we do not get to keep charging you as though we did.
Ready to start?
Book a free 15 minute consultation, or start with a 20 minute Academic Clarity Plan.
Learn more about our Nashville in person learning center here.
