A note on key performance indicators

My son goes to a wonderful elementary school – all his teachers have been terrific. His county school board produces the worst report cards ever (so far).

The report cards are ‘growth-based’, meant to measure progress from competency levels exhibited at the beginning of the school year. Fair enough. But there are 40 ‘essential learnings’ in language, and 26 in math. And the parent has no guide as to which of these ‘essential learnings’ have been emphasized in class, or as to which are most important for general progress. My older children now attend a school where they are simply given letter grades, and I – and surely most parents? – find a ‘B+’ in a subject more informative about how they are doing than bar graphs for 40 different kinds of finely-grained definitions of skills within a single subject.

Arts organizations take note: in choosing metrics, or KPI‘s, remember the ‘K’: what is truly key to what you are trying to achieve. Too many metrics, with no sense of how to weigh their relative importance, is less informative to your stakeholders than a short list of measures closely tied to prioritized goals.