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.
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.
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.
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.
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.