“Not everything that counts can be counted,

and not everything that can be counted counts.” William Bruce Cameron

This is the season when a school year becomes legible. The State releases its performance reports. Proficiency rates and percentiles take shape. We can finally say, with evidence, how our schools did.

We are proud of what those numbers show this year and will share them with you below. But I want to be honest about what a number is. A proficiency rate is a record of something that has already happened. It is the shadow a year casts after the fact. It does not tell you about the morning a teacher noticed a child had gone quiet, or the conversation that changed how a sixteen-year-old reads a difficult book. The most important work in any school happens in a space no report can reach between a teacher and a student.

So in these same weeks, we do the other kind of accounting. We gather in auditoriums and cafeterias to name the people the data can never fully capture. We recognize the educators who instilled in their students something no test will ever measure. Both forms of measure are true. Both matter. But anyone who has spent real time in a classroom knows which one comes first.

What follows is some of each. A clear-eyed look at what our schools accomplished this year, and credit rightfully where credit is due to all of the people who made it so. Read the numbers with pride. Then recognize the people with a little more.

Thank you, as always, for the trust you place in us.

Read the entire Corner Column here.