Three Things I Love About This Data Guide
A reference worth keeping close for anyone working on school data.
Clean Data, Clear Vision: An Independent School Data Strategy Handbook. The Center for Institutional Research in Independent Schools (CIRIS) is based at Maret School in Washington, DC, and works to strengthen institutional research across independent schools. In September 2026, CIRIS published this 96-page handbook, written by its 2025–26 Fellows Lab cohort of data and institutional research leaders and edited by Executive Director Eric Heilman. It was developed with input from NBOA, ATLIS, and CASE, and in coordination with NAIS's data collection work. Chapter by chapter (demographics, student life, admissions, employees, and advancement), it sets out what data a school should collect, how to format it, and how it connects to sector benchmarks like DASL.
I've spent real time with all 96 pages. Here are three things I love about this guide.
1. They call it a style guide.
For most of my career, I've worked with data across many schools rather than deep inside one. That makes documentation hard. Go too deep and you get caught in the weeds of one vendor's system or one school's way of doing things.
A style guide works at the right level: shared conventions for how data gets recorded, detailed enough to act on, broad enough to fit any school. It gives us a common starting point for the conversations that come next.
2. It starts an inventory of our hardest problems.
I've spent years working with many software vendors and many tools. There always comes a point where you want one insight from two separate systems, and their data doesn't line up. What should be an easy answer becomes a hard one.
Reading the guide, I kept running into problems I've lived: a family's records after a divorce, one student arriving with three inquiry email addresses, the same parent with two phone numbers in two systems and no clear way to know which one wins.
These problems are as old as school software, and each school has been working through them on its own. Having them written down in one place, shared across schools, each with a documented starting point, gives all of us something to build on. I hope it becomes a running list we keep adding to.
3. It makes the case for a data team.
Years ago, I gave a talk to Heads of School and handed everyone in the room a button that read "I ❤ data." I asked whether they would wear it proudly. If not, that was fine. But who at their school would they pass it to? If they couldn't name that person, they were missing a critical skill on their team.
CIRIS closes in the same place: data is an institutional asset, like buildings, and it deserves an intentional team. I'm thrilled to see the institutional researcher role gaining traction in independent schools. For schools not yet large enough for that position, the need is the same. Someone has to be the data thinker. Who would wear the button at your school?
Before everything moved online, many of us kept The Chicago Manual of Style within arm's reach. When a question came up about a comma or a citation, nobody had to invent the answer. For those of us working on school data, this guide can play the same role, a reference that lives on the desk, even if the desk is now a browser tab. That matters more now than it did a year ago.
AI can bring real efficiencies and smarter workflows to school operations, but only if the data underneath is clean. As AI capabilities arrive inside the systems we already use, clean data is what lets them deliver.
With thanks to Eric Heilman and the CIRIS Fellows Lab, who researched and wrote this handbook for the independent school community.
