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Academic Health

The vault of academic data comes out as a blob of CSV exports.

With Academic Health, we do it faster and better. It turns your CSVs into reports and guides leaders to interventions and next steps: the same mountain of data the school already exports, turned into one tracker of the students on the edge each week.

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The Week’s Export, Start to Finish

Drop in the week’s export, a script swaps every student name and ID for a code before any AI touches it, and the reports come back.

One export, start to finish, in about a minute and a half, with music.

You can try the coach (opens in a new tab). It is the part that guides leaders to next steps, and it works without student names.

One mountain of ninth grade data, two ways it can go A line drawing. Left of center, a mountain of paper: reams stacked at broken angles with loose sheets wedged in and spilling at the foot, so tall it runs off the top of the frame, with open space to its left. A small chair stands at its base for scale. First, one thin line leaves the base of the pile and wanders far to the right, doubling back on itself, and stops at a blunt dead end with nothing receiving it. Above, along one baseline for the school year, four tall ticks mark the four looks, and the three long gaps between them are drawn as measured spans with their own end marks. Everything to the right of the dead end is empty. Then the wandering line pulls back into the mountain, and as it does it uncovers a faint continuous trace of its whole route that was under it the whole time, which stays, and which recedes further as the new drawing completes. A short straight line cuts through the pile from the same point and out the far side into one small sheet with a tight row grid, the tracker, with a few rows flagged. Four routes of four different shapes leave the tracker at different moments: a long rising curve to a fan of handout sheets, the straight cut continuing to a thick stack of cards, a straight diagonal to a thin stack of cards, and a late descending curve to a single agenda sheet beside a table with seats around it. Each produces an action: a loop that leaves a flagged row on the top handout, touches a class block and returns into the same row; one card pulled clear of the thin stack; one card slid clear of the thick stack with a check mark on it; a short arrow from the table. A light line collects the four, turns a rounded corner and runs back under the year strip into the pile. The spans in the year strip retract, and the four tall ticks retract with them, each uncovering a faint copy of itself that stays. A fine regular comb takes the baseline, one mark for every week, with the four faint tall ticks standing in it. Then, after the drawing is complete, a last beat: beside the fan of handouts, in the open space to its left, a heading and four questions appear one at a time, and from each a short light leader reaches a flagged row on the handouts, three of them newly flagged as the leaders arrive.

8 CSV files a week. Tens of thousands of rows.

One export runs to thousands of rows, and nobody has time to cut them by hand.

Four looks a year.

Every week.

One tracker, each week. The students on the edge are its flagged rows.

Handouts for each teacher

Reports for each student on the edge

Reports for all the other students

An agenda for the weekly team meeting

What a teacher can now answer

Are my grades genuine representations of student mastery?

Are there assignments that everybody did poorly on that I need to reteach?

Are there assignments where a lot of kids didn’t turn them in?

Are there types of assignments that I just don’t have enough of, or that I have too many of and that are misweighted?
One mountain of ninth grade data, two ways it can go A line drawing, stacked top to bottom. At the top, a mountain of paper: reams stacked at broken angles with loose sheets wedged in and spilling at the foot, so tall it runs off the top of the frame. A small chair stands at its base for scale. First, one thin line leaves the base of the pile and wanders down the middle of the frame, doubling back on itself, and stops at a blunt dead end with nothing receiving it. Down the right edge, one baseline for the school year carries four tall ticks for the four looks, and the three long gaps between them are drawn as measured spans with their own end marks. Then the wandering line pulls back into the mountain, uncovering a faint continuous trace of its whole route that stays and recedes further as the new drawing completes. A short straight line drops out of the pile from the same point into one small sheet with a tight row grid, the tracker, with a few rows flagged. Four routes of four different shapes leave the tracker at different moments: a descending curve to a fan of handout sheets, the straight drop continuing to a thick stack of cards, a straight diagonal to a thin stack of cards, and a long curve swinging left to a single agenda sheet beside a table with seats around it. Each produces an action: a loop that leaves a flagged row on the top handout, touches a class block and returns into the same row; one card pulled clear of the thin stack; one card slid clear of the thick stack with a check mark on it; a short arrow from the table. A light line collects the four, runs up beside the year strip, turns a rounded corner and enters the pile. The spans in the year strip retract, and the four tall ticks retract with them, each uncovering a faint copy of itself that stays. A fine regular comb takes the baseline, one mark for every week, with the four faint tall ticks standing in it. Then, after the drawing is complete, a last beat: four short light leaders run left out of the fan of handouts from four flagged rows, three of them newly flagged, and the four questions they point to appear one at a time in the list beneath the drawing.

  • 8 CSV files a week. Tens of thousands of rows.

  • One export runs to thousands of rows, and nobody has time to cut them by hand.

    One tracker, each week. The students on the edge are its flagged rows.

  • Four looks a year.

    Every week.

  • Handouts for each teacher

  • Reports for each student on the edge

  • Reports for all the other students

  • An agenda for the weekly team meeting

  • What a teacher can now answer

  • Are my grades genuine representations of student mastery?

    Are there assignments that everybody did poorly on that I need to reteach?

    Are there assignments where a lot of kids didn’t turn them in?

    Are there types of assignments that I just don’t have enough of, or that I have too many of and that are misweighted?

Academic Health Data Reports, drawn as the same mountain of data twice: once cut by hand, and once by the tool, which turns it into one tracker of the students on the edge each week.

One Export, Four Reports

The same Tuesday morning, from the file landing to somebody picking up the phone.

  1. Step 01

    What You Start With

    One export out of the student information system. Every graded assignment, for every student, one per row. Thirty-eight columns of codes, and nothing in it is a next step.

    This is the mountain before anyone has cut it.

    An invented gradebook export open as a spreadsheet. Columns of codes: student id, course code, section, assignment id, points possible, points earned, and a flag column reading MISS or LATE. Eighteen of nine thousand one hundred and forty rows are visible, and none of them says what to do.

  2. Step 02

    What You Ask For

    I drop in the week’s export, a script swaps every student name and ID for a code before any AI touches it, and then I tell it to run the weekly reports. Same instruction every week, same rows as last week, so the change is the thing you see.

    There are never student names in it. A script that is not AI turns every child’s name into a code first, and the coded version is what the AI reads, so it has no idea what the codes mean, and the names come back on your side after the reports are built.

    The reports tool with nothing run yet. One typed instruction sits in a box: run the weekly reports off this export, region, team, teacher, and one page for every student in the cusp band, keeping the same rows as last week. Under it, two lines describe the step that replaces every name with a code before anything is read.

  3. Step 03

    Report 1, the Region

    The region page shows every campus, the students on the edge, and the one campus to call today. It points at the one place worth a phone call, and it doesn’t rank anybody.

    Report one of four, the region view. A headline reads nineteen students in the cusp band, three of five campuses up since week two, one down. A table lists five invented campuses with how many students are in the band, the rate above a three point zero, the change since last week and the missing work rate, with one campus flagged red. Below it, three lines naming what changed since last week.

  4. Step 04

    Report 2, the Team

    The same numbers cut for the grade team, down to the students they actually share. This is the page they bring to their weekly team meeting.

    Report two of four, the team view for an invented campus. A headline reads five students in the cusp band and three not passing a core course, all three in the same subject. A table compares the four grade teams, and a second table names the five students that team shares, with each one’s grade point average, the change since last week, their standing and the single course that is driving it.

  5. Step 05

    Report 3, the Teacher

    This one is cut again for one teacher, and written for a coaching conversation rather than an evaluation. It names the pattern before it names a student, because in this case two assignments explain most of the problem.

    Report three of four, the teacher view for an invented English teacher. A headline reads three sections, nine students not passing and forty-six missing assignments, with a line noting that thirty-eight of the forty-six are the same two assignments. One section is flagged red in the table of three. A second table names the nine students, their grade, how many assignments they are missing and the first one to recover.

  6. Step 06

    Report 4, the Student

    There is one page per student, written to the student, with the same rows as the regional memo cut for the person whose grade it is. The gap to the target is on the page, and so are the three moves that close it.

    A student report in the suite look. A snapshot strip shows the semester one GPA, this week’s GPA, the change since last week and the gap to target. A grades table lists every course, with the failing course flagged in red. Below it, where the student stands and three next moves with a date on each.

  7. Step 07

    What a Person Decides

    The tool proposes who talks to whom and by when. A person changes what they want changed, and one row it will not fill in at all, because the student with the most missing work has an advisor who is out the rest of the week.

    It does the sorting and hands the calls back to you.

    The call list from the reports tool. A red card says nobody is assigned to one invented student and lays out two options for who should take him, with no recommendation. Below it a table of nine students names who talks to each one and by when, with two rows marked changed by you and one marked as needing a person.

How It Works

The export arrives, the instruction is one line, and the reports come back with the same rows they had last week. Nobody retypes a number, rebuilds a spreadsheet to answer a question that’s already answered, or waits on the one person who knows the formulas.

The time you have left goes to reading the page and deciding who to go see.

Four steps: look at the numbers, say what you see, read what comes back, change what it got wrong. There is no upload, no setup and nothing to learn, because the whole interface is a box you type into.

It replaces the week where nobody gets to the numbers and the plan gets written on the way to the meeting.

If you have an export nobody reads, give me thirty minutes and we’ll talk it through.

Book a quick call (opens in a new tab)Or write me at chris@habetlerconsulting.com.