I have a confession to make, one that’s difficult for me to admit publicly: I think I may have to break up with my beloved spreadsheets.
If you’ve worked in education for more than five minutes, you know the type of spreadsheet I’m talking about, the one that somehow became “the system.”
It started with the best intentions. A few columns. A few colors. Maybe a filter or two if someone on your team was feeling particularly adventurous.
Then it grew. Someone added another tab. Someone created Version 2. Someone added a pivot table. Someone emailed it to three people. Someone saved a copy on the shared drive. Someone else updated yesterday’s version instead of today’s.
Suddenly, there were five “master” spreadsheets, and everyone was absolutely certain theirs was the correct one. Schools have been quietly held together by these heroic spreadsheets for decades, which is why I wasn’t expecting to get a little ... disloyal.
But recently, I ran into a problem in my department. We needed a complicated form to get to the right people for approval, flag potential concerns along the way, and keep moving without requiring someone on our team to manually manage every step.
Instead of writing up yet another checklist, I decided to spend the time up front to build a better workflow. I spent all day watching YouTube videos and asking ChatGPT to help me troubleshoot when I got stuck. By the end, I managed to connect my tools so information could move where it needed to go and flag a person when human attention was required.
The information now simply goes where it needs to go, and notifications happen automatically. Approvals are routed without someone playing email traffic controller.
The technology itself wasn’t what surprised me; the mindset was. Somewhere along the way, I had accepted that administrative friction is just part of working in education.
Teachers fill out forms, principals forward them, district staff reenter the same information in new forms. Someone eventually notices something is missing and sends another email, downloads another attachment, updates another spreadsheet. And the whole process repeats.
We rarely question the process because we’re too busy surviving it. I wonder how many things in education fall into that category. How many routines exist simply because they’ve always existed? How many hours are spent every week moving information instead of making decisions? How many talented people spend their day serving systems instead of students?
Notice I didn’t say AI would solve all of this. Schools are human organizations, and they should stay that way.
The conversations that matter most in education—coaching a new teacher, supporting a struggling employee, helping a family through a difficult situation, building trust with a staff member—cannot and should not be automated.
But the administrative work surrounding those conversations? Maybe we’ve been carrying more of it than we need to.
The funny thing is, I didn’t leave my computer thinking, “Technology is amazing.” I left thinking, “Why have I accepted so much unnecessary work?”
For years, I had framed innovation in education around instruction: a new curriculum, new assessments, new teaching strategies, or, more recently, artificial intelligence.
Those conversations deserve the attention they receive, but innovation belongs in district offices, too. It belongs in human resources, finance, transportation, special education, communications, school operations, and every place where people quietly keep schools running. Every unnecessary administrative task steals time from work that actually requires a human being.
And this work cannot belong to IT departments or technology leaders alone. The people closest to a process often know exactly where the friction lives. We may not know how to build the solution yet, but we know which form gets stuck, which approval requires three follow-up emails, and which spreadsheet has quietly become mission critical. That operational knowledge has to be part of the conversation.
So yes, I’ll probably keep a few color-coded spreadsheets around. (Old habits die hard.) But for the first time in a long time, I’m wondering whether they were solving the problem or simply helping me manage it.
And I suspect there are more educators than we’d like to admit quietly asking themselves the same question.
