Data Redefined: Turning Hidden Numbers into Local Action
Back at the December 2022 Board of Education meeting, I pointed out that a tiny shift in how we present data can reveal previously obscured information. A report that looked perfectly ordinary on the surface actually contained a major yet hidden problem. It didn’t require a math degree to uncover – just a change of perspective, building the graphs a little differently.
Since that night, I’ve been fixated on a glaring reality: our district is sitting on a goldmine of data, but we aren’t organizing and presenting it in a way that helps the BOE or our community take real action.
Can’t See the Forest for the Trees
We’ve seen recently what happens when school boards provide insufficient oversight. While there are plenty of reasons for this, one persistent culprit is inadequate reporting. This goes way beyond test scores.
Consider our February 25, 2026 BOE meeting. The district’s new auditors quietly dropped a bombshell: board members had been completely misinformed by the administration’s financial reports. When asked how BOE members could have possibly spotted the red flags, the auditor’s frank reply was: “They would not know.” Some of us have spent countless hours learning to decipher those monthly financial reports. Unfortunately, they are incredibly dense, so it is remarkably easy to miss the forest for the trees. Imagine how different things would be if a BOE had insisted on a “forest” report – a clear, high-level map of where our money is actually going.
Building a Better Lens
While the district holds a wealth of data that it simply lacks the resources to format and share – a constraint that has historically left both the Board of Education and the community without access to critical information – the state provides public spreadsheets we can use to measure our schools’ performance. One limitation regarding these data is that the state provides it mostly in isolated, single-year fragments. A single year of data tells you where you are, but it can’t tell you where you’ve been, where you’re going, or whether things are getting better or worse.
The state also provides a public dashboard, but it, too, has its limits, and we cannot make our own changes or extensions to it.
To fix this and provide more flexible access to the data, I’ve been building a relational database that consolidates the scattered state spreadsheets into a single, centralized data repository. Connecting and combining multiple years of data allows for more meaningful analyses.
Using this data, I’ve started building our own dashboard that uses interactive graphs to enable exploration of the data in ways that can meet our needs. My goal is simple: to provide a clear window into how education is evolving in our schools over time and to give us a tool we can easily expand as new questions arise. This dashboard is just one possible view into the database.
Because one of my goals is to spark community conversations, I’ve built in two communication features:
- The “Share” Button: When you click share, it copies the exact view, filters, and selections you are looking at so you can send it to a neighbor. The neighbor will see exactly what you saw when pressing the button.
- Smart Printing: Printing a graph automatically generates a unique QR code. Anyone who scans that code will be taken directly to the exact live, filtered view you printed. This lets a piece of paper act like a share button.
The Questions Only the District Can Answer
A second limitation regarding the data and dashboard is that it is already aggregated. This prevents drilling down into the data to identify correlations between different groups. For example, we can see how demographic groups performed in 3rd or 9th grade, but we cannot see how predictive 3rd-grade performance is of 9th-grade performance.
Superintendent Turner has rightly championed the need for transparency through dashboards. At the June 2026 meeting, Mr. Graber and a bright student intern shared a great overview of a new district dashboard project. During public comment, I raised a few crucial questions that we could answer if we used the district’s internal data – questions that cannot be answered using the state’s data alone. Some examples of these questions that we should be asking and answering are:
- Maximizing Pre-K: We can already see distinct racial and economic achievement gaps in our third-grade math results (for context, statewide trends often show proficiency gaps of 20% to 30% between different demographic groups). We’ve invested heavily in Pre-K to give our kids a head start. Is it working? By tracking anonymous individual student paths from Pre-K to third grade, we can see exactly who is getting the boost and where any breakdowns occur.
- Curriculum Reality Checks: Fine-grained data would allow us to ensure we emphasize the foundational skills most critical to a student’s future academic success, helping us pinpoint and fix curriculum weaknesses.
- Benefits of Restorative Justice: How did discipline rates and chronic absenteeism shift when Restorative Justice was introduced to each building? This is timely because the district changed how Restorative Justice is implemented this year. Those same data can show us whether the changes are working, or if a further course correction is required.
- Successful Completion of Graduation Assessment: We can see here the percentage of our students who passed the state’s graduation assessments each year vs. the percentage who required an alternate path. Observed changes in the rate at which students require an alternate path provide insight into whether our district is improving its preparation of students for lives beyond graduation. The trends we can see in the state’s data are positive for ELA, though less so for Math, but the state does not break this down by demographics. Without using the district’s data, we’ve no idea what Achievement Gap might be hiding in these outcomes.
Moving Forward
Whether we are talking about math scores, multi-million dollar budgets, or school culture, clear and comprehensive reporting and thoughtful analysis of the data is the lifeblood of proper oversight.
The Board of Education has the policy-setting authority and role to require exactly which reports it needs to do its job. Demanding better data isn’t just about accountability – it’s the single best way to ensure our board can deliver the best possible outcomes for our students.