Work sample · 9th grade academic health · 28 regions · 48 high schools · three school years

The numbers were always there. Nobody could use them.

A ninth-grade on-track initiative I led at KIPP, and the weekly artifacts it produced. Tens of thousands of rows a week, technically available to everyone and legible to nobody. Nothing here was built for a job application.

Christopher Habetler · Senior Director, High School Advancement, KIPP Foundation, 2024 to 2026
chris@habetlerconsulting.com · chrishabetler.com · Download the 8-page PDF

The one thing

Transparency and timeliness. It was not a new metric or a new platform. Take the number that already exists and put it in the hands of the person who can act on it, in a form they can act on, while the quarter is still open.

Every proposal that year got measured against that sentence. If it did not put the data into somebody's hands sooner, it did not get built, however good it was.

Before

One export per school per week. Tens of thousands of rows across a dozen files, technically available to everyone and legible to nobody. Cutting it by hand ran about twenty hours over four days, so it did not happen, and the picture reached people at report cards.

After

The same rows, cut seven ways and delivered to people who each own a different decision. A memo for the region, a scripted agenda for the team, a tracker for the adult owner, a page for each teacher, a page for each student. Built with Claude Code in about thirty minutes, in hand every Tuesday.

How we got there

Year one

Define excellence

Named what good looks like in a ninth grade and wrote the manual. Six metrics, an intervention guide, a shared vocabulary.

Year two

Build the tools

Made the resources schools could opt into. Trackers, protocols, reteach and reassessment. Adoption was voluntary and uneven.

Year three

All in on the one thing

Stopped adding. Spent the year making the same data visible and current, and let the reports pull people into the tools we had already built.

The exhibits, in the order they touch a week

The report did the persuading. A coach could act on it, a teacher could act on it, a student could act on it, and every one of those moves showed up in the next week's data.

Weekly regional update memo
To the five regional leaders who held the school. What moved, what did not, what I am worried about.
Quarterly strategy memo
The reporting drives a written change of plan, with the arithmetic attached.
Cusp student tracker
Nineteen named students, one adult owner each, status recalculated weekly.
Team meeting agenda and facilitator script
Forty-five minutes, scripted, so it runs the same whoever holds it.
Teacher digest
One page per teacher. Fidelity gap, weak assignments, her own cusp students.
Student report
Written in second person, to the fifteen-year-old, ending in moves.
Handoff bundle
Eight folders, transferred before my last day. She runs it now.

46%

of 9th graders at 3.0+ GPA, Q3 Final, all 48 high schools. Up 6 points, best quarter on record

schools met the GPA anchor goal, the most ever

−7%

course failures year over year

1 → 4

one export, cut into four documents: region, team, teacher, student. Twenty hours by hand, thirty minutes built

Academic Health · Christopher Habetler1

Exhibit 1 · Network and regional level

Weekly regional update memo

Audience: regional leadershipCadence: weeklyAuthor: meStudent names: synthetic

The week starts here. Sent to the five regional leaders who held this school. Five metrics, five marking periods, and a plain reading of what is moving and what is not. Figures are real; student names are replaced.

KCAP 9th Grade Academic Health: Regional Update

To: Gerald, Stephanie, Tricia, Caleb, Maisie | From: Christopher Habetler | Date: April 28 (Q4 W3) | Re: Team progress and handoff

Where we are versus last week

Metric	Last week (4/21)	This week (4/28)	Change
1. Teachers with zero ungraded assignments (goal 80%)	11 of 31 (35.5%)	14 of 32 (43.8%)	+3 teachers
2. Total missing assignments	1,631	3,214	+1,583, visibility cost
3. Overall failure rate (failing 1+)	141 of 205 (68.8%)	141 of 205 (68.8%)	flat headcount
4. Teachers meeting gradebook fidelity	4 of 28 (14.3%)	17 of 32 (53.1%)	+13 teachers
5. 9th graders at 3.0+ GPA (target 36%)	42 (20.5%)	55 (26.8%)	+13 students
Total ungraded assignments	90 of 367 (24.5%)	60 of 570 (10.5%)	down 33%

The fidelity number is the win. Thirteen more teachers met all three category targets in one week. Thursday's PD did real work. The open question is whether it holds once the dedicated PD time is gone.

The flat failure rate is the alarm. Same 141 students. Underneath it, total F grades grew from 338 to 349, and students carrying five or more Fs nearly doubled, 11 to 22. The middle of the cohort is moving up and the bottom is moving down.

The missing-assignment jump is mechanical, not behavioral. Teachers entered roughly 8,000 more graded assignments this week, which exposed work students had never turned in. That work was always missing. It just was not visible. Friday's deadline tests whether students close it.

In context: five marking periods

Metric	Q1 Final	Q2 Final	S1 Final	Q3 Final	Q4 W2	Q4 W3
Average GPA	2.37	2.22	2.31	2.25	1.95	2.09
Failing 1+ class	38.9%	45.1%	35.4%	38.5%	68.8%	68.8%
At 3.0+ GPA	32.5%	25.7%	30.6%	27.8%	20.5%	26.8%
Students with 5+ Fs	6	17	12	17	11	22

Q4 is in progress. It reads worse than the Q1 through Q3 finals because grading is incomplete and missing work is being entered in real time. Read it as a leading indicator, not a final.

The 19 cusp students, tracked by name

Cohort locked on year-to-date GPA. Three adult owners, six or seven students each.

Push group (YTD 2.84 to 2.95)	YTD	Q3	Q4 W2	Q4 W3	Fs
Student A	2.95	2.79	2.55	2.74	1
Student B	2.91	2.46	2.26	2.87	0
Student C	2.91	2.74	3.07	3.06	0
Student D	2.88	2.87	1.47	1.44	2
four further rows in the push group

Fragile group (YTD 3.00 to 3.18, must hold)	YTD	Q3	Q4 W2	Q4 W3	Fs
Student L	3.18	3.13	2.39	3.26	1
Student M	3.13	3.05	2.50	3.00	0
Student N	3.04	3.03	2.00	1.54	3
eight further rows in the fragile group

Student N is the case this memo flags for immediate intervention. Above a 3.0 all year, three Fs in two weeks. Without a weekly cadence that student surfaces at report cards, in June.

Academic Health · Christopher Habetler2

Exhibit 2 · Where the reporting led

Quarterly strategy memo to regional leadership

Audience: regional leadershipCadence: once a quarterPurpose: change the plan, in writing

Every quarter, the same reporting forces a decision. The weekly memo keeps people current. This one changes what we do. Written at the Q2 close, it names the wins, names what I got wrong, and narrows Q3 to a single cohort with the arithmetic attached. Teacher and student names replaced.

KCAP 9th Grade Academic Health: Q2 Final Review and Q3 Strategy

To: Gerald, Stephanie, Tricia, Caleb, Maisie | From: Christopher Habetler | Date: February 5

Semester 1 progress

Metric	Q1	Q2	S1 avg	Change Q1 to Q2
% at 3.0+ GPA	33%	27%	30%	down 6 pts
# at 3.0+	68	55	–	13 students lost
% with 1+ F	61%	46%	–	down 15 pts
Overall failure rate	–	14.9%	–	–

What worked

Failure rate dropped hard. Students with one or more Fs went 80% in early December, to 61% at Q1 close, to 46% at Q2 close. The interventions are doing what we said they would.
The cusp cohort is positioned. Thirteen of our fifteen target students carry zero Fs. These are passing students who need small improvements, not failure recovery.
The systems hold. Weekly data cadence, teacher handouts, cusp tracking and the 9th grade team meeting are all operational and, more to the point, sustainable without heroics.
Teachers moved. Several are now under a 20% failure rate who were not in Q1.

What did not work

We lost ground Q1 to Q2. Six points off the 3.0+ measure, thirteen students who were above the line in Q1 and are not now. That is the number I am accountable for.
High-failure teachers are still high. One section sits at a 41% failure rate carrying 46 Fs. Coaching there has not landed yet and needs a different approach, not more of the same.
Broad beat focused, and it should not have. The Big Three strategy was too wide. We ran three priorities at once and finished none of them. Q3 needs a narrower target.

Q3 strategy: narrow to the cusp cohort

The Big Three stays as the foundation. What changes is which one gets the attention.

#	Priority	Q3 status
1	Move cusp students above 3.0	Primary focus
2	Align gradebooks with policy (the 4 Rs)	Ongoing teacher support
3	Reduce course failures	Monitoring and intervention

The arithmetic, so the goal is not a feeling. Fifteen named students sit between a 2.5 and a 2.99. We are at 55 students above 3.0. Move all fifteen and we are at 70, which is 34 percent, which is the Q3 target. That is the whole plan. Fifteen students, three adult owners, six students each.

Next steps

Feb 5, Q3 launch meeting. Assign an adult owner to each cusp student and co-plan the outreach approach in the room, not afterward.
Weekly. Pull the data, track cusp progress, adjust interventions.
Teacher support. Continue check-ins with the 41% section and the other high-failure teachers.

Please let me know if you have questions or want to talk through any part of this.

Academic Health · Christopher Habetler3

Exhibit 3 · The cohort itself

Cusp student tracker

Audience: the adult ownerCadence: recalculated weeklyRows: 19 named studentsNames: synthetic

This is the object the whole strategy hangs on. Once the data was current, the same pattern showed up everywhere: most students under a 3.0 were not failing anything. They sat between a 2.5 and a 2.99, passing every course, missing a handful of assignments, invisible because nothing about them tripped an alert. So we named them, locked the cohort, and gave every one of them an adult. Status is computed, not judged.

KCAP 9th Grade Academic Health: Q4 W2 Target Students

19 students tracked | three adult owners, six or seven students each | cohort locked on year-to-date GPA | April 22

Push group (YTD 2.84 to 2.95): below 3.0, close enough to cross

Student	Q1	Q2	Q3	YTD	Q4 W2	Chg	Fs	Classes failing	Miss	Status	Adult
Student A	3.13	2.92	2.79	2.95	2.55	−0.40	2	English I, Theater I	6	CRITICAL	Cruz
Student B	3.13	3.13	2.46	2.91	2.26	−0.65	1	Algebra I	7	OFF TRACK	Cruz
Student C	3.03	2.95	2.74	2.91	3.07	+0.16	0	None	3	CROSSED	Cruz
Student D	2.67	3.10	2.87	2.88	1.47	−1.41	3	English I, PE, Physics	6	CRITICAL	Cruz
Student E	2.59	2.87	3.16	2.87	3.10	+0.23	0	None	5	CROSSED	Cruz
Student F	2.76	2.91	2.94	2.87	2.70	−0.17	1	Physics	5	OFF TRACK	Cruz
Student G	2.82	2.74	2.98	2.85	2.31	−0.54	2	Algebra I, World History	7	CRITICAL	Cruz
Student H	2.77	2.85	2.90	2.84	3.92	+1.08	0	None	7	CROSSED	Cruz
Push summary: 3 crossed · 2 off track · 3 critical. Eleven more rows follow in the fragile group, students already above 3.0 who have to hold it.

How status gets set

Status	Rule	What the adult owner does this week
CROSSED	Q4 GPA at or above 3.0, zero Fs	Confirm and protect. One check-in, no new plan.
OFF TRACK	Below 3.0, one F or fewer	Name the specific assignments and get them on Friday's redo list.
CRITICAL	Two or more Fs, or a drop over half a point	Same-week conversation, family call, and a redo plan by course.

Student D is why the cohort gets recalculated every week rather than every quarter. Above a 2.85 year to date, three Fs and a 1.41-point drop inside two weeks. On a report-card cadence that student surfaces in June, when nothing can be done about it.

Academic Health · Christopher Habetler4

The week this meeting sits in

Tue

Data drop; the week's deliverables generate

Wed

45-minute team meeting from the scripted agenda

Thu

Adult owners build redo lists

Fri

Redos to students, end-of-day deadline

Mon

Lunch study hall; work gets finished

Exhibit 4 · School and coach level

Weekly team meeting agenda with facilitator script

Audience: the 9th grade teamCadence: Wednesday, 45 minutesBuilt to: run without me

The tracker only matters if somebody is held to it on Wednesday. Every red line is scripted, so the meeting survives a substitute facilitator or a departure. Commitments get checked by name before anybody looks at new data, which is the move that turned a data meeting into an accountability loop. Names synthetic.

KIPP Capital High School

9th Grade Academic Health, S2.3 Check-In | February 25 | S2 Student Tracker and AH Hub

Commitment check-in (5 min)

"Let's walk through commitments. I'm going to go one by one. Just tell me: done, not done, or in progress."

"Alana, goal-setting conversations with your six cusp students. How many did you get to? Which students?"

"On my end, I got the data snapshots out, teacher reports are done, and the practice AM meeting happened. Here's what I learned from it."

Commitment	Owner	Due	Impact / barrier
Goal-setting conversations with 6 cusp students	Alana	3/4	Informal, few done
Goal-setting conversations with 6 cusp students	Bea	3/4
Goal-setting conversations with 6 cusp students	Corine	3/4
Family launch calls for cusp students	Alana	2/26
Cusp student data snapshots sent	Chris	–
Teacher reports updated with cusp flags	Chris	–

Data and headlines (5 min)

"Alright, let's look at the numbers. Take a second to read the table. What jumps out at you?"

(Pause. Wait for the team to respond, at least 10 seconds.)

Metric	Wk 2	Wk 3	Change	Target
9th graders at 3.0+ GPA	20.5%	26.8%	+6.3 pp	36%
Teachers meeting gradebook fidelity	14%	53%	+39 pp	80%
Students failing 1+ course	31.4%	27.9%	down 3.5 pp	under 15%
Total ungraded assignments	612	388	down 224	Falling

Naming the win (3 min)

"Before we go to problems. Ms. Okafor's failure rate dropped 13 points this week. She added five summatives from zero. That's the biggest single-week move in the building, and I want everyone to hear the mechanism, not just the number."

Routing the week (15 min)

If the data looks like this	The move is
Under 15% failing, strugglers scattered	Cusp work: tutorial system, student trackers, mentor pairing
Over 15% failing, half from one or two sections	Teacher and course work: gradebook scrub, reteach and reassess
Over 15% failing, spread across the grade	Gradewide work: data review protocol, advisory check-ins

Equity check runs before the routing call, never after. Disaggregate first, and consult student support services where gen-ed and IEP gaps diverge.

Academic Health · Christopher Habetler5

Exhibit 5 · Teacher level

Biweekly teacher digest

Audience: one teacherCadence: every other weekGenerated: automatically, Tuesday

Same data, cut for the person who assigns the grade. One page per teacher, handed over in the Wednesday meeting. Individual and specific, never a ranking. This is where "who knows which part of the job" becomes visible. Two teachers in the same course with different fidelity gaps is a coaching plan rather than a coaching guess. Names synthetic.

Academic Health Teacher Digest

9th Grade | Week of March 5 | Rivera, A. | Teaches Grades: 9

Targets

Metric	Target	Current (Gr 9)
% with GPA 3.0+	32%	18%
% with 1+ Fs	under 15%	70%

Course failure rates

Course	Gr	Failure rate	Failing / total
English I	9	35.2%	19 / 54
English I Honors	9	8.3%	2 / 24

Gradebook fidelity

Grading frequency targets are set by school grading policy.

Course	Category	Have	Target	Gap
English I	Formative Assessment	2	3	−1
English I	Summative Assessment	1	1	0
English I	Class Performance	3	2	+1
English I Honors	Formative Assessment	3	3	0
English I Honors	Summative Assessment	1	1	0
English I Honors	Class Performance	2	2	0

Assignments below 70% average

Class average is below 70%. Consider reteaching or offering retakes.

Assignment	Course	Avg score
U3.L5 Reading Comprehension Check	English I	52%
U3.L7 Vocabulary Quiz	English I	61%
U4.L1 Essay Draft	English I	45%

Assignments with a high number of "not turned in"

Assignment	Course	# not in
U4.L1 Essay Draft	English I	15
U3.L5 Reading Comprehension Check	English I	8

Cusp students

Students with a GPA between 2.50 and 2.99 who are close to 3.0. Help them get there.

Student	Gr	GPA	Missing	High impact assignments
Alvarez, D.	9	2.78	U4.L1 Essay Draft; U3.L7 Vocabulary Quiz	U3.L5 Reading Check (42% vs 68% avg)
Whitfield, M.	9	2.91	–	U3.L5 Reading Check (48% vs 68% avg); U4.L1 Essay Draft (55% vs 72% avg)
Osei, T.	9	2.52	U3.L5 Reading Check; U4.L1 Essay Draft; U3.L7 Vocab Quiz	–

Q3 ends: March 27

Academic Health · Christopher Habetler6

Exhibit 6 · Student level

Student report, written to the student

Audience: the studentCadence: weekly during the pushHanded over by: her adult owner

And cut once more, for the person whose grade it is. One per student in the cusp band. Second person, plain language, ending in moves rather than in a diagnosis, because a report a fifteen-year-old can read is a report a fifteen-year-old can act on. The pipeline anonymizes and decouples student records before analysis runs. Names and figures below are synthetic.

Alvarez, Daniela R.

Semester 2, Week 3 Academic Update | March 5 | Advisor: Ms. Rivera

Needs attention: English I

Your snapshot

S1 GPA	Week 2 GPA	Week 3 GPA	Change, W2 to W3	S2 target	Gap to target
2.95	1.00	1.93	+0.93	3.05	1.12

Your grades right now

Course	Q3 grade
Algebra I	D
English I	F
Math Intensive (0.5 credit)	P
Physical Education I	P
Physics	B−
Spanish II	A+
World History and Geography I	C−

Where you stand

Your GPA dropped from 2.95 to 1.93. That is a 1.02-point drop, and closing it means consistent effort every day from here to the end of Q3. Good news: you are up 0.93 since last week.
You are not passing English I. That one F is pulling your GPA down.
You have 23 missing assignments, 29% of your total. Turning those in is the fastest path to raising your grade.
You need a 3.05 to hit your S2 target. You are at 1.93, so the gap is 1.12.

Your next moves

Turn in your 23 missing assignments. Start with the four in English I.
Talk to your English I teacher this week about retakes, corrections, or extra support.
Check in with Ms. Rivera. Every assignment counts from here.

Assignments to complete: 23 of 80 graded

These are assignments other students have been graded on, but you do not have a score yet.

Assignment	Course	Category
U2.L14 Exit Ticket	English I	Class Performance
U2.L14 Homework	English I	Class Performance
Unit 2 End-of-Unit Exam	English I	Summative Assessment
U2 Performance Task	English I	Summative Assessment
Diagnostic #25	Math Intensive	Class Performance
Participation and Behavior, week of 2/24	Physical Education I	Class Performance
Conversation Practice	Spanish II	Class Performance
Past Tense (Regular AR, ER, IR Verbs)	Spanish II	Class Performance
fifteen further rows in the shipped version

Academic Health · Christopher Habetler7

Exhibit 7 · After me

The handoff, and what moved

None of it is worth much if it leaves when I do. An initiative that needs its author has an expiration date on it. Before my last day the whole system was packaged and transferred to a colleague. She runs it now.

What was transferred	Contents
01 Operating instructions	The weekly workflow, the meeting sequence, the escalation rules, written for someone who was not in the room when it was designed
02 Operating procedures	Formatting specifications and generation procedures for each deliverable, so output is identical whoever runs it
03 Build scripts	The generation pipeline, with every rule in a configuration layer she can change without calling me
04 Master tracker	The live student and teacher tracker, cusp cohort flagged
05 Recent week examples	A full run of the most recent week's outputs, so she could see finished work before producing any
06 Templates	Blank and partially built versions of each weekly deliverable
07 Gold-standard exemplars	One annotated model of every artifact in this portfolio
08 Historical data	Q1, Q2, S1 and Q3 by school, for pattern comparison across the year

And one piece that left the network entirely. The routing logic in this system, the part that decides whether a week's data calls for cusp work, teacher work or gradewide work, is published as a free coaching app any school leader can use: the Academic Health Coach, at playlab.ai/project/cmpyg60jd1533mz0w8iyiel79. It asks a leader for the week's numbers and walks the same forks the intervention guide walks. Built on Claude, like the reporting pipeline and like the tool I would expect to build here.

Results

Two levels, kept separate

The network figures are the conditions I worked inside and they belong to a great many people. The school figures are from the building I was in every week.

Network: all 48 high schools, 28 regions	Result	Note
9th graders at 3.0+ GPA, Q3 Final	46%	Up 6 points year over year, the best quarter for this metric in network history
Schools meeting the GPA anchor metric goal	20	The highest number ever recorded
Course failures	−7%	Year over year
Chronic absenteeism	−3 pp	Network-wide, same period

One school, one week (Q4 W2 to W3)	Week 2	Week 3	Change
9th graders at 3.0+ GPA	20.5%	26.8%	+6.3 pp
Teachers meeting gradebook fidelity	14%	53%	+39 pp

Fidelity moved first, after a focused push in the Wednesday meeting. GPA followed, because a scored assignment is the only kind that can raise a grade. That order is the argument in miniature.

Build the system. Install it well enough that the people running it a year later think it was theirs all along.

All exhibits de-identified. The production pipeline anonymizes and decouples student records before analysis runs, and these pages were rebuilt with synthetic student names against the formatting specifications the live deliverables use. Figures are unchanged.

Academic Health · Christopher Habetler · Download the 8-page PDF8