Quantifying the Unquantifiable

If you read mission statements or strategic plans for independent schools, you will come across a wide variety of aspirations. Some of these goals, like “academic excellence” or “financial sustainability” are concrete and have a variety of established metrics schools rely on to assess where they are and to measure progress over time. These more prosaic aims, however, are often but a minor slice of a grander vision schools have for themselves. Across the country, we see schools aspiring to foster “squishy” outcomes like collaboration, entrepreneurship, wellness, and equity, inclusion, and justice.

We do not, however, see a corresponding proliferation of metrics to measure and track these squishy outcomes, leaving school leaders at every level to rely on their gut instincts and personal perspectives to “feel” whether the institution is improving in these dimensions. When asked why they do not have more concrete metrics in place for outcomes that are of such high institutional priority, by far the most common response we hear at the Center for Institutional Research in Independent Schools (CIRIS) is a belief that the squishy aspects of school experience like justice or wellness simply can’t be quantified. At CIRIS, we take the position that developing quantitative metrics of these essential goals is not only possible but also highly valuable for schools.