Your Kid’s School Has More Data Than Ever. So Why Are Kids Still Slipping Through the Cracks?

By: Otus Team

Student data has never been more abundant in K-12 schools. Grades, test scores, attendance, behavior, profiles—you name it. And yet, kids who need help are still getting missed. The information is there, and the teachers most certainly care, but that valuable student data often lives in a dozen different systems that don’t talk to each other. As a result, educators are stuck digging through spreadsheets when they should be teaching.

That’s the problem Chris Hull set out to solve when he co-founded Otus, and it’s the thread that runs through his recent conversation with Dr. Joe Sebestyen on the SupportED Learning Podcast. The entire episode is worth a listen, but here are three key takeaways that hit hardest.

3 Lessons K-12 Leaders Can’t Afford to Ignore

A grade tells you almost nothing about what a kid really knows

Educators have known this for years but rarely say it out loud. An A in calculus doesn’t tell you which formulas a student has genuinely mastered and which ones they’ve learned to work around. A B in AP English doesn’t tell you whether a student is ready for the exam or just good at meeting a specific teacher’s expectations.

“If I am a student who'd gotten an A in class, I am going to believe I'm prepared for that test. So how do we really bring that alignment to say, ‘What are you ready for? Where are your skills at?’ As a teacher, I would ask, ‘Are they really at that skill level, or am I grading their compliance with what I've asked?’”

Chris Hull

President and Co-founder
,
Otus

As Chris put it, standards-based grading offers a more honest picture, but even that framing can get lost in translation. Imagine if your resume just said, “I got an A on my last job.” Nobody would take that seriously. But that’s essentially what traditional grades are asking colleges and employers to accept.

What matters are skills. What can this student do? Where are the gaps? What comes next? That’s the information that moves the needle.

A gap in fourth grade can quietly haunt a kid in seventh

This is especially important for parents, and it doesn’t get talked about enough. Chris described how standards work just like a spiral staircase: they revisit the same concepts year over year, each time at a higher level of complexity or application. Which means a shaky foundation in one grade continues to follow a kid up the staircase.

This is exactly why catching things early matters so much, and why the kind of longitudinal student data Otus pulls together is so valuable. A seventh-grade teacher who can see how a student performed on related standards in fifth and sixth grade has a fundamentally different picture than one working only from this year’s grades.

They can see the pattern.

They can target the actual gap instead of the symptom.

“That's really where I think we're going as we get better and better at understanding this information and understanding the progression it takes. That we're gonna be able to really pinpoint with precision how to help them. And I think we can soon transform homework, instead of generic practice, into targeted tune-ups around, ‘This skill would benefit from a little additional practice, or this skill would really unlock your advancement to the next progression skills.’”

Chris Hull

President and Co-founder
,
Otus

AI can give teachers back time that matters

There’s a lot of noise right now about AI in education, and a lot of it misses the point. Anyone in K-12 education knows that AI is never replacing teachers. It’s simply not going to happen. The question worth asking is whether AI can take enough off a teacher’s plate that they can spend more time doing the thing only they can do: knowing their students.

While the goal may appear to be efficiency, it’s really about making space for connection. When a teacher isn’t spending an hour manually sorting students into groups for a project, or querying three different systems to pull together a student’s history before a parent-teacher conference, that time goes somewhere better.

The schools that are getting this right, as Chris explained, aren’t waiting for a perfect solution. They’re diving in, using the data they have, staying honest about gaps, and getting a little better every day. That, more than any single tool or platform, is what separates the districts making progress from the ones still waiting around for the magic bullet.

“I think it's the understanding that perfection is the enemy of done. It's really important that you just accept that things aren't going to be perfect. Strive to get better every day, look at the data and don't try to hide from it, and say, ‘This is where we're currently at’, and then use that as the launching point.”

Chris Hull

President and Co-founder
,
Otus