What Did It Take From People to Produce That Number?

FIELD NOTE #005 · 📍Destination: Accountability & Follow-Through · Get Clear

There's something about school accountability season that can make us rush to the end of the story. The grade. The growth status. The proficiency percentage. The designation. Did it go up? Did it go down? Did we get off the list? Did we make the list?

And I understand why — those numbers matter. They affect how schools are perceived. They shape conversations with boards, staff, families, authorizers, and communities. They can influence support, intervention, pressure, and sometimes even a leader's sense of whether the year was a success.

But after enough years sitting in school improvement conversations, I've learned to ask another question: what did it take from people to produce that number?

📍Current Reality

The number is the end of something. It's the result of hundreds of decisions that happened long before the report was released.

A teacher changed the way she grouped students. A principal tightened the expectations inside PLCs. A leadership team stopped looking at data once a quarter and started looking at it every week. Someone redesigned the intervention schedule. Someone coached the teacher who was struggling. Someone noticed that one subgroup wasn't responding the same way as everyone else. Someone stayed after the meeting because the first plan wasn't working. Someone had to say, "we need to do this differently."

The number doesn't show any of that.

That's why I don't think school improvement starts with asking whether the number is good or bad. It starts with asking what produced it. What changed before the number changed? What changed in instruction, in leadership routines, in how teams used data, in the schedule, in intervention, in how principals monitored implementation, in how quickly the team responded when something wasn't working?

If we can't answer those questions, we may know that the number moved without really knowing why it moved — and that makes the improvement harder to protect. If we don't know what created the gain, we can't be sure we'll keep doing it.

🔄Missed the Turn

This is the part that often disappears from the celebration: improvement has labor attached to it.

Someone had to learn the new practice. Someone had to coach it. Someone had to monitor it. Someone had to create the materials. Someone had to have the uncomfortable conversation when implementation was inconsistent. Someone had to cover the gap when staffing fell short. Someone had to keep asking whether the work was reaching the students it was intended to reach.

That doesn't mean improvement shouldn't require effort — of course it does. But there's a difference between intentional effort and a system that succeeds only because a few people are willing to keep carrying more. That distinction matters especially when a school has a strong year, because a number can improve before the system underneath it becomes sustainable.

Did we build a stronger system, or did people just work harder? Those aren't the same thing.

If the improvement depended on one principal personally checking everything, what happens when that principal leaves? If one instructional coach was holding the entire intervention process together, what happens when that position is vacant? If teachers had to routinely work beyond the time and capacity available to them just to make the strategy function, is that an improvement model we can realistically sustain?

If a new process works only when everyone gives 110% indefinitely, that's not a strong system. It's a fragile one. School leaders should be able to tell the difference between "we got better because our system got stronger" and "we got better because people stretched themselves far enough to make a weak system work." Both can produce an improved number. Only one is likely to hold.

💡New Information

North Carolina's 2025–26 accountability results brought plenty of positive headlines. Fewer schools are designated low-performing. Fewer are continually low-performing. More schools statewide met or exceeded expected growth.

But when I look more closely at the charter-school data, the story gets more complicated. Among charter schools with reported growth, the percentage meeting or exceeding expected growth declined from 72.5% to 68.3%. At the same time, the number of low-performing charter schools fell from 53 to 45.

Even that decrease needs context. Twenty-three charter schools exited low-performing status. Fifteen newly entered it. So the net number improved — but the movement underneath it went in both directions.

And among the charter schools that remain low-performing, there are two very different groups: twenty are low-performing and meeting expected growth, and twenty-five have a D or F grade and are not meeting growth. Same broad concern. Different trajectory. Different diagnosis. Different next move.

North Carolina's lab-school results give us an especially clean example of why the label alone isn't enough. Two lab schools remain designated low-performing. Both met expected growth. But Appalachian Academy at Middle Fork moved from an F to a D and gained 13 points, while D.C. Virgo Preparatory Academy remained an F and declined 3 points. Same designation. Same growth status. Very different movement.

If we respond only to the label, we risk giving both schools the same improvement plan. But one may need us to protect and accelerate what's beginning to work. The other may need us to understand why the overall score moved backward even while expected growth was met. Labels are useful for identifying where to look. They're not sufficient for telling us what to do next.

🧭Next Right Move

One of the most useful questions we can ask after a strong result isn't "how do we celebrate this?" It's "what can we learn from this well enough to reproduce it?"

That matters especially when schools operating under similar expectations — the same curriculum, the same district guidance, the same assessment calendar, the same state accountability system — still produce very different outcomes. That's where I want leaders to get curious. What was different about implementation? How frequently did leaders look at the data? How quickly were students identified for additional support? What happened after the data meeting? Did teachers receive usable feedback? Were expectations clear? Did staff understand the why behind the strategy? Was somebody responsible for following through?

Those details may not appear anywhere on the School Report Card. But they often explain the School Report Card.

The number matters. The grade matters. Growth matters. The designation matters. But those are outputs. Leadership happens in everything that came before them — the routines, the decisions, the staffing, the support, the follow-through, the adjustments, the people.

So when the next data meeting begins, I hope we ask more than "what did we score?" I hope we also ask: what did it take from people to produce that number? Which parts of that effort should become part of the system? Which parts depended too heavily on individual people? What worked well enough to protect? What can't continue the way it currently operates?

And maybe most importantly: if we produced this same result again next year, could we do it without asking people to carry more than the system was designed to hold?

Because improvement isn't only about moving the number. It's about building a system strong enough to keep moving when the people inside it don't have to be heroic just to make it work.

Real Support. Real Systems. Real Results.

If you're heading into your own data conversations wondering what's really underneath this year's number, take the free School Leadership Reality Check — a clear, honest look at where the gap actually is, and where to start closing it.