Measuring What Matters
Are we measuring what matters? Can everything be measured? Should everything be measured?
What does it really mean to measure academic success in a Christian school? While data and benchmarks are everywhere, discerning which metrics genuinely drive meaningful growth is far from simple. At Hill Country Christian School, this ongoing quest sparked a bold initiative: the creation of an academic dashboard designed to illuminate not just statistics, but relationships among systems, programs, and purpose. In this post, Chief Academic Officer Sarah Novlan invites readers behind the scenes of building a tool that brings vision, alignment, and accountability to educational leadership. Discover how one school’s pursuit of clarity is helping chart a confident path ahead.
These questions framed my first months as chief academic officer at Hill Country Christian School. Charged with creating a metric that illustrated the school’s overall academic state, I asked our academic team, “Can we identify everything that falls in the realm of academics, and do we understand how these components are connected?” Ask a dozen schools everything that constitutes academics and the responses will vary. But in order to make strategic changes or even know if something should be changed, I wanted a framework to understand all of the interrelated levers of academics at our school. My end goal was clarity in our current status and confidence in the path ahead.
I was new to my role and the role was new to our school; I asked leaders at other schools if they had any system or process for defining the components of academics and assessing their alignment. The response I received was consistent—sounds like an interesting idea, but how would one go about creating such a thing?
Call it blind naïvete or an inability to accept the abstraction of ill-defined realities, but over the course of the next year, I started to design an academic framework for our leadership team. I wanted to be able to update it annually, have it provide a longitudinal record of key changes in academic programming, and eventually, have it record how those changes create ripple effects in other areas of academics.
Below I share the goals our academic team committed to and the process we used to arrive at our final product: an academic dashboard. I’ve also included a snapshot of our actual dashboard and thoughts on its utility for our school.
Goals of an Academic Dashboard
Our academic team comprised myself, our head of school, and our three division principals. Together, we acted with three goals in mind:
To develop and maintain a dashboard of metrics that monitor and optimize our academic progress and performance as they relate to the mission, vision, and core values of the school.
To demonstrate what systems, policies, and programs we have in place in order to promote academic progress and performance.
To evaluate what systems, policies, and programs could potentially be incorporated or adjusted in order to further promote academic growth and make recommendations accordingly.
The Process of Forming a Dashboard:
Conduct an internal audit. We identified all academic components of our school and assigned them one of two designations: qualitative or quantitative data. I used mind-mapping exercises to organize the components and as categories emerged, we established what I call “pillars” of academics at our school.
If you’ve ever taught an English class, there’s always a moment when a kid brings you a paper for help. You ask him to find his thesis and alas, he can’t find it because he didn’t write one. The same thing happens with an internal audit. What key metrics are we getting from our alumni feedback system? Wait, we don’t have an alumni feedback system? Perfect— now we are beginning to identify some critical gaps.
Assess the alignment of components internally, then externally. What is missing? What is the weak link? What is working? We looked at the components within each pillar and then assessed the pillars in relation to each other. Is one pillar out of alignment with the rest? This visual of the pillars proved helpful just to see where the preponderance of programming was.
Make insightful, strategic recommendations. The identification and organization of academics illuminates the degrees of gaps in programming. For our team, it was obvious that the pillar of testing didn’t connect to what we were doing in other areas of our school. Was there a way we could bring that into better alignment? For us, it meant transitioning away from our previous standardized tests and moving to the CLT 3-8 for our elementary and middle school students. Having the dashboard also helped us quickly see that this strategic shift might have a long-term impact on our college matriculation and scholarship dollars if we offered the CLT to our high school students.
(slide from our academic committee planning)
The Utility of a Dashboard
I compile our annual recommendations into a narrative report that outlines the strengths and weaknesses of each area. I use this to inform my annual board report, to prioritize initiatives, and to plan strategically for the year ahead. Our dashboard gives me a real-time perspective of our current status and an overview for where we need to go next. Perhaps the pillars of academics at your school are established or you have a more thorough system to keep track of everything. Do you need a dashboard? Probably not. But if, like me, you find that mentally tabulating the dynamic, interrelated complexities of everything that falls under the umbrella of academics can feel unwieldy at times, a dashboard might help.
(snapshot of dashboard landing page; each component is linked to an individual data report)
Sarah Novlan has served as the Chief Academic Officer at Hill Country since 2022. Over the past two decades, she has served as an instructional coach, department chair, curriculum writer, and teacher in Christian education. She holds a BA in English and Education from the University of Texas at Austin, a M.Ed from SMU, and is currently a doctoral candidate at ACU where she is completing her dissertation on Harkness seminars, researching how the cognitive and affective benefits of Harkness foster opportunities for metacognition in humanities classrooms.