Why Public Teacher Leaderboards Backfire — and What We Built Instead
A public teacher leaderboard turns colleagues into competitors and punishes teachers working with harder classes. The Teacher Impact Card gives a principal a real, private signal on teaching quality — visible only to that teacher and their principal, never published, never compared across staff.
Why we refuse to build a public leaderboard
Ranking teachers publicly rewards the teacher who happens to have the strongest class, not the one doing the hardest work with a struggling one. It also invites gaming — inflating attendance, avoiding difficult students — instead of genuine improvement. A principal who wants an honest read on teaching quality needs a private conversation, not a scoreboard the staff room can see.
How it works
- Step 1
Real signals, not gut feel
Class attendance trend, syllabus completion, and parent feedback roll up into one card per teacher, per month.
- Step 2
Visible to exactly two people
The teacher sees their own card. Their principal sees it too. No other teacher, ever — enforced at the database level, not just hidden in the interface.
- Step 3
A conversation starter, not a verdict
The card is meant to open an honest one-to-one conversation between a principal and a teacher, not to rank staff against each other.
What it does not do
- It does not publish a leaderboard, ranking, or percentile visible to other staff.
- It does not include salary, payroll, or any compensation data.
- It does not let a teacher see any other teacher’s card, under any role or query path.
Frequently asked questions
Can other teachers see anyone else’s Impact Card?
No. Access is restricted to the teacher themselves and their principal or school admin, enforced by the database’s own row-level security — not only hidden in the app screen, which could be worked around.
Is this used to rank teachers against each other?
No public ranking exists, by design. There is no leaderboard, no percentile shown to staff, and no comparison surfaced to anyone outside the teacher and their principal.
What goes into the card?
Class-level signals a principal can already see in fragments elsewhere — attendance trend, syllabus completion percentage, and parent feedback — brought into one private view instead of scattered across registers.
Does salary or payroll data appear anywhere near this?
No. This schema carries no salary column at all — it is a structural decision, not a setting someone could accidentally turn on.
See the Teacher Impact Card on your own phone
Message us on WhatsApp for a walkthrough of how the card looks to a principal.