Three signs your school's reporting is broken

Most schools' reporting cycles are quietly broken in ways the leadership team doesn't see, because the people closest to the brokenness have stopped raising it. The signs are consistent across schools of very different sizes.

Sign one. The same number is being produced two different ways and they don't quite match.

The most common version of this is attendance. Compass says one thing. The state-level reporting platform says something marginally different. The internal weekly attendance report from the deputy principal says a third number. Each is correct from its own definition. Each was the right answer to the question the original system was asked. The leadership team is using all three numbers interchangeably, which means it is implicitly making decisions based on all three definitions at once. This is fine until somebody at a board meeting asks which one is the real number.

Sign two. The reporting is being typed by hand on a Friday by somebody who is not the leadership team.

The structural issue here is not the work. It is what the work means about the underlying systems. If a manual person is reconciling the report every Friday, the data underneath has at least one of the following problems. It is not in a single source. It is in a single source but the source can't produce the format being asked for. The source can produce the format, but the leadership team has stopped trusting the source. Each of these is a different problem, and each has a different fix. None of them are solved by hiring a more efficient typist.

Sign three. Nobody can answer the question "when was this last validated against ground truth?"

By validated, I mean somebody literally checked, with their actual hands, that the number on the dashboard matched the number that was true in classrooms and offices on a particular day. Most school reporting flows have not been validated end-to-end since they were originally built. The data is accepted because no one has had reason to doubt it, until one specific number raises an eyebrow at a council meeting and then everyone is suddenly very interested in where it came from.

What to do about it.

Pick one critical metric. Attendance is usually the easiest, because everyone in the school has an intuition about it. Nominate one person to be the owner of that metric. Have them, over a period of two weeks, validate it from the original source through to the leadership dashboard. Document each transformation. The exercise is not glamorous. It is also nearly always revealing.

By the end of two weeks, you will know exactly where the data quality breaks. You will know which transformations are reliable and which are not. You will know whether the manual Friday work is necessary or theatrical. And you will have a single page that the next person who inherits this metric can use as a starting point, instead of inheriting the same opacity that the current owner inherited.

You don't need to do this for every metric. You need to do it for the one that turns up in the most leadership decisions. That alone will usually pay for itself within a term.