When teachers don't record attendance, eSchool marks every student present. This investigation maps the gap between what we measure and what we report.
BCPS maintains ~91% compliance and reports ~96% attendance. Their number is trustworthy — teachers are actually recording who shows up. KBC averages 26% compliance and reports 97% attendance. Most of that 97% is the system auto-filling “present” because nobody logged the real data.
The pattern is consistent: the less you measure, the better the numbers look. This is not anyone gaming the system. It is a structural incentive problem — the default value is the happy answer.
eSchool, like most student information systems, requires a daily attendance record for every enrolled student. When a teacher submits attendance for their class, students marked absent get an “A” code. But when no one submits attendance at all, the system needs a value — and the default is “present.”
This means low compliance does not just create missing data — it creates false positive data. Every unchecked student inflates the attendance rate. A school could have 50% real attendance, but if nobody records it, the dashboard shows 100%.
On their lowest-compliance days, KBC and DCHS report attendance approaching 100%. That is not stellar teaching — that is the system defaulting every unchecked student to present.
BCPS barely has any dots below 75% compliance. They are doing the work. Their attendance data can be trusted as a genuine measure of who was in the building.
Compliance: 2.3%. Of the roughly 90 expected attendance checks at KBC that day, two were completed. Reported attendance: 100.0%. Every single student marked present — not because someone verified they were in their seats, but because the system filled in the blanks.
Compare to BCPS on the same day: 96.2% compliance (they actually checked), 100.0% attendance. Both report the same outcome, but one is a measurement and the other is a default.
When compliance is low, the reported attendance rate is a blend of real data and defaults. We can estimate the “real” rate by looking only at students whose attendance was actually recorded. If unchecked students follow the same pattern, the district-wide attendance picture changes substantially.
At KBC, the estimated real rate is roughly 88% — nearly 9 points below the reported 96.9%. At DCHS, the gap is about 4 points. BCPS, with 91% compliance, barely moves. The lesson: compliance is not an administrative checkbox. It determines whether we are seeing the truth.
When we cannot measure who is actually in the building, we cannot identify who is about to leave. Part 3 of The Reckoning quantifies what that blindness costs — in dollars, in students, and in trust.