When I first joined the charter school world, I was really surprised to find that every charter school used a slightly different stack of software to track academic data. Because tools were different across schools, no built-in dashboarding tools would suffice when having leadership conversations between principals and administrators. Early on in my time at Democracy Prep, our team was charged with coming up with a design for a dashboard that principals at each school would be responsible for keeping on a weekly basis. These dashboards were intended to act as a data journal, and were fundamentally tied to the idea that every conversation that occurs between the superintendent and the principal should be based on some standardized datapoints.

Over eight years, I went from being a contributor to the primary developer on this project. Initially I worked closely with another data wrangler as well as the superintendent herself to come up with the metrics that appear throughout the dashboard, but over those eight years, I also collaborated with countless principals, assistant principals, and leadership teams at more than 20 schools to refine the presentation of the data, tweak the calculations, and incorporate new data points that would help to drive the conversation and push principals to set and work towards goals.

Leader Dashboards use Google Sheets as a user interface, but are driven by a series of scripts that run in the background and are largely invisible to the user. Data is pulled and manipulated from several different student information systems, which is then staged into a data warehouse, from which many of these calculations are derived.

Each tab of the spreadsheet breaks data out thematically into different domains, and surfaces a handful of metrics that are recalculated and logged for each individual week in a school year. Over the course of the year, those numbers are gradually plotted on charts and tables that span either the whole year or the last seven weeks, giving leaders the ability to drill down into specific data points for subgroups of students, grade levels, classes, and more.

Initially it was explicitly desired that principals should be computing the data that went into these dashboards themselves. The idea was that the act of crunching those numbers was good practice- it forced principals to comb through the data themselves, and thus acquaint them with it. Over time, that idea shifted towards more automation; today, all of these files automatically update on a weekly basis with data spanning all the different domains of data, pulling from a variety of source systems that are updated on a daily basis. Still, principals have the ability to run a script that will update the data on an ad hoc basis if needed.