Good Numbers
The Students I Stopped Counting
Issue #31
Good Numbers
My scores were going up.
Year one, up. Year two, up again. Year three, same story. By year four my superintendent was showing off my school’s data at board meetings. Holding it up. Pointing to it.
Reading proficiency. Math proficiency. Both moving in the right direction four years running.
A commendation letter went into my file. People in central office started saying we had turned a corner.
And I believed them.
I need you to understand that part. I was not running a scam. I was not doing anything that felt wrong on any given Tuesday morning walking into that building. I was proud of what we had built. I talked about it. I presented it. I stood in front of my staff every year and pointed to those numbers as evidence that the work was working.
The scores were good.
For four years, that was enough for me.
She had been on my staff eleven days.
My new assistant principal. Very sharp. Asked questions the way good educators ask questions, not to challenge anyone, just because she genuinely needed to understand how things worked before she could do her job well.
Eleven days in, she knocked on my door and sat down with a spreadsheet she had built on her own time. She said something in the data had been bothering her and she couldn’t figure out why, and she wanted to ask me about it before she assumed anything.
I looked at the spreadsheet.
Then I looked at it again.
The scores had gone up. That was true. But they had gone up because of which students we were pushing toward intervention. Which teachers were getting the coaching hours. Which classrooms I was prioritizing when time and resources ran short.
The students close to the proficiency line had moved. With the right push at the right time they crossed it, and crossing it moved the percentages, and moving the percentages made my report look the way everyone wanted it to look.
The students far from that line had not moved.
Because nobody had been pushing them.
Not because I decided not to. Because somewhere across four years my school had slowly stopped organizing itself around them. Without a meeting. Without anyone saying it out loud. Without any single decision I could point to and say — that is where it happened.
They were still enrolled. Every one of them.
They had just stopped being part of my plan.
I sat there looking at that spreadsheet for a long time.
Four years. Four years of good numbers and board meetings and people telling me the school had turned a corner.
And…I had turned a corner. Just not the one I thought.
I want to be honest with you about what that felt like.
It did not feel like getting caught. It felt worse than that. Getting caught means someone else found something you knew was wrong. This was different. This was sitting across from a spreadsheet and understanding, for the first time, that something I had believed about myself for four years was not true.
I had believed I was running a school that was getting better.
What I had actually been running was a school that was getting better at serving the students who were easiest to move.
Those are not the same thing. And I had let four years go by without ever asking the question that would have shown me the difference.
My assistant principal was still sitting across from me.
I told her: give me a few minutes. I need to make a phone call.
I called my superintendent that afternoon. Not to manage anything. Not to get ahead of a story. To tell him what I had found, take responsibility for what I had missed, and ask for his support to fix it.
It was a hard phone call to deliver.
Not because I was afraid of what would happen to me.
Because I had to say out loud that the students who needed me most were the ones I had, without ever meaning to, served the least.
We rebuilt the intervention system over the next two years. Started with the students my data had stopped counting. Reorganized coaching hours. Walked into classrooms that hadn’t been visited in months. Sat with teachers who had been quietly managing impossible caseloads because nobody had checked.
My scores went down in year five.
First time in a long time they were telling the whole truth.
I have since thought about those four years more than almost anything else from my time in that chair.
Not because of what went wrong. Because of how easy it was to miss. How completely reasonable every decision felt in the moment. How genuinely I believed I was doing right by kids because the reports said so and the superintendent was pleased and the commendation letter was in the file.
The metrics told me a story. I stopped asking whether the story was complete.
That is what I want you to take from this.
Not that I was a bad principal. I don’t believe that. But I was a principal who got comfortable with good numbers. And comfort, in this work, is where the drift can start.
There are students in your building right now who are not part of your plan. Not because you decided to leave them out. Because the system you are running — like most systems — pulls toward what is measurable and away from what is hard.
The question I should have been asking every year is the one my assistant principal asked after eleven days.
Who is in these numbers.
And who stopped being counted somewhere along the way.
I could have buried that spreadsheet. Nobody outside my office knew what was in it. She had only been there eleven days.
I picked up the phone instead.
That’s the one decision from those four years I am most proud of.
THE TRANSFERABLE PRINCIPLE THIS WEEK
Good numbers are not the necessarily the same as a good school. They are a question. Who is inside these numbers, and who stopped being counted? Every organization can drift toward measuring what is easy to move and away from what is hard to reach. The leader’s job is to keep asking who isn’t in the plan. Not once. Every month, every year. Before someone who’s been there eleven days has to ask it for you.
Until next time — the chair is yours.
Next issue: The parent who threatened to go to the board — and why I told her she should.
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