In Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Ben Stein flattened an entire generation's expectations of roll call with two syllables: Bueller…
Forty years later, districts are still calling names into rooms and getting nothing back, except now there's a dashboard tracking it. The dashboard knows exactly who is missing, but it has no idea whether anyone in the building would recognize them.
Maurissa Koide has thoughts about that gap. She's Director of Secondary Education at Santa Clara Unified School District*, with a doctorate from USC and a dissertation on restorative practices. She started teaching in 2001, at a middle school in the East San Jose district where she'd been a student herself, so she's watched attendance go from a clipboard problem to a software problem without ever becoming a solved problem.
This week, a twenty-minute check that counts the students nobody could describe.
*The podcast was recorded while Maurissa Koide was the Director of Secondary Education at the Milpitas Unified School District
Here’s what’s on the dashboard this week:
Today’s Deep Dive: The 20-minute roster audit
What We’re Tracking: Teacher turnover dat and NYC’s AI pause
From Our Desk: YouTube and… marriage advice?
Watch of the Week: The End of Oak Street as staff PD
The 20-minute roster audit
Your district has a plan for what happens when the server goes down, when a bus breaks and when payroll misfires. Somebody has mapped the redundancy. Nobody has mapped what happens when the one adult who actually knows a given student takes a job two districts over in June.
Maurissa Koide's version of that map takes about twenty minutes in a staff meeting.
Ask every secondary staff member to list the students they could describe without opening a file and ask for three details that aren't test scores.
Hold that list against the full roster and sort what comes back in these three categories:
Covered. Named by two or more adults. These students prove the system works when it's staffed, which is the part that convinces skeptics on your board.
Thin. Named by exactly one adult. This student's belonging sits one resignation away from zero.
Uncovered. Named by nobody. Functionally invisible to a system that will still hold them accountable when something goes wrong.
What to expect: The uncovered list runs longer than a cabinet expects, and it won't correlate with behavior. Plenty of quiet, compliant students land on it. The number also jumps at grade six, when a student trades one adult who knows them completely for six who each know a sixth.
What to do with it: Uncovered students get assigned. Thin students get a second adult. Neither move needs new funding, and both of them live on a document you already rebuild every spring.
The check gives you a number, and a number survives budget season in a way that a laminated poster about relationships does not. In our full playbook, Maurissa goes into the four schedule decisions that move it.
Your Turnover Number Is Lying to You: A new ERS analysis across six states found annual teacher turnover dropped from 20% to 16% between 2021-22 and 2024-25, but roughly four in ten exits were teachers leaving the state or the profession entirely and plenty of the rest just moved rooms. Early-career teachers were at least 7 percentage points likelier to leave the classroom, which tracks, given that a first-year teacher's job description is usually identical to a fifteen-year veteran's.
600,000 Students Have Left the Building: Over 600,000 public school students were enrolled in fully virtual schools in 2024-25, about one in 80 kids and double the pre-pandemic figure. Most are in charters, high schoolers opt in at twice the rate of grades 1-8 and the research on academic outcomes remains uncomfortable enough that everyone has agreed to stop bringing it up.
NYC Hits Pause on AI, and Everyone Else Takes Notes: New York City is running a one-year moratorium on student-facing AI tools from 2-K through 8th grade, covering 600,000 students, plus screen caps of 30 minutes daily for grades 3-5 and 45 for grades 6-8. Teachers can still use AI for planning, and every tech tool in the system now faces review against whether it's mission-critical to learning, a bar that several vendors are going to find surprisingly high.
Counselors Are Selling One Product: A Rand survey found 66% of middle-income high schoolers said educators heavily emphasized four-year college, against 16% for technical training and apprenticeships and 11% for community college. Follow-through is the other half of the story: 71% of students planned to visit a workplace and 39% did, which is roughly the completion rate of every district strategic plan ever written.
Meta Owes Everybody Money Now: Meta agreed to pay as much as $17 billion to 51 states and territories over teen social media addiction claims, with payouts spread across ten years and states deciding where it lands, including possible grants to districts. The settlement also switches off teen push notifications from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. on school days, meaning the phone in third period will finally be quiet, assuming the student in question hasn't simply opened the app.
New Federal Rules Would Reach Private School Tax Status: Proposed Treasury regulations released Sept. 3 would strip tax-exempt status from private schools that factor race into admissions, scholarships or programming, affecting what the department says is 18,000 institutions. Race-neutral criteria like family income and first-generation status would still be permitted, the rule would take effect after May 31 next year and there's a 60-day comment window open now.
We were really normal about hitting 100K YouTube subscribers.
Speaking of our YouTube channel, it’s where we publish video episodes of our podcast. Read a little behind-the-scenes intel about the early days of that podcast (and about building a business with your spouse…) here.
POV: You ask the marketing team to vlog their morning routines. Here’s the result.
Planning to attend the below events? Drop an email to [email protected] and let’s meet up:
Sept 18: Temecula Appreciation Event (CA)
Sept 24-25: Texas Leaders Round Up Event
Watch of the Week: The End of Oak Street
Why we’re obsessed: A 1982 suburb gets ripped out of its neighborhood and dropped somewhere completely unrecognizable, and the Platt family survives entirely on the strength of relationships they built before the crisis started, which is either a dinosaur movie or the most expensive district PD metaphor ever filmed.
Recommended integrations for staff PD and district meetings:
What "returning to normal" actually costs: The neighborhood cannot go back. Districts could have chosen not to and mostly chose to anyway. Discuss which systems you restored in 2021 purely because restoring them was easier than defending a change to the board.
Legacy systems, literally: The threat in this movie is a species that has been extinct for 66 million years and is still somehow in the building. Ask your team which of your processes fit that description. The 2011 intervention binder is a velociraptor and everyone knows it.
The two-timeline exercise: The film ends with two versions of the same person, one who lived through the event and one who was warned in advance. Run it on your own district. Version A got the warning in the attendance data. Version B is writing an incident report.
Single points of failure: A family of four in a hostile environment with no backup, no redundancy and one dog. Now open your master schedule and count how many students have exactly one adult who could describe them without opening a file.
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