Schools have never had more data. So why is it still so hard to turn that data into action?
Maybe we've been solving the wrong problem.
For decades, schools have invested in better assessments, dashboards, reports, integrations, and now artificial intelligence. The assumption has been simple: if educators have better access to information, better decisions will follow.
But access is only part of the problem.
Every new source of information competes for one limited resource: educator attention.
Teachers and school leaders are asked to locate information across systems, reconcile conflicting signals, interpret increasingly complex displays, remember what they saw, determine what matters, and translate all of it into a decision-often while managing dozens of other demands at the same time. The result is not necessarily a lack of data. It is a growing amount of work before the work.
In The Attention Gap, Kyle Holder examines the cognitive burden hidden inside the way schools collect, deliver, and use information. He challenges the idea that making more data available is the same as making it useful and offers a different way to think about data-informed decision making: begin with the decision, then design the information environment around the attention required to make it well.
Drawing from years of work with schools and district leaders, Holder explores how organizations can reduce unnecessary cognitive work, make information easier to act on, rethink reports and dashboards, evaluate whether recurring information rituals are worth the attention they consume, and use emerging technologies such as AI without simply creating more noise.
The task in front of schools is no longer just making information available. It is deciding what deserves to be seen, by whom, at what moment, and for what purpose-and then protecting the human attention required to turn that seeing into judgment, and that judgment into care.
The Attention Gap is for educators, school leaders, data teams, technology leaders, and anyone responsible for designing the systems through which people are expected to make better decisions.
Because the goal should never have been more data.
The goal should be better decisions.
