Every bureaucracy overvalues secrecy and undervalues the inevitability of exposure

Bureaucracies function through layers of reporting and review, and these layers create an administrative environment where information moves upward in controlled pathways that privilege institutional interests, because officials rely on curated datasets to demonstrate capability, and these curated datasets shape public understanding.

The structure rewards leaders who present clean numbers and reassuring summaries, and this reward system encourages the omission of data that would reveal institutional shortcomings, which means the information that reaches the public reflects what the bureaucracy believes will preserve confidence rather than what will support accountability.

Overview

This is what I’ve been mulling over:

When institutions track harm poorly, the harm grows

Residential schools kept inconsistent death records, minimised outbreaks, buried inconvenient reports, and treated data as a threat to be overcome or optics tool. Today, public schools obscure exclusion by recording children as absent rather than removed, and hide disability-specific data.

When institutions hide data, the truth comes out anyway

The Bryce Report came out.
The TRC came out.
The unmarked graves came out.
The suppressed memos came out.
Every bureaucracy overvalues secrecy and undervalues the inevitability of exposure.

When the truth emerges, public trust collapses

The federal government faces this with residential schools.
BC faced it with the opioid deaths.
School districts will face it when exclusion is finally fully understood.

The public believes governments that hide numbers have something to hide

This is a universal political pattern.
A government that refuses transparency chooses suspicion over credibility.

Bureaucracies and the curation of truth

Bureaucracies operate through stacked layers of reporting and review, and these layers create an environment where information flows upward through channels engineered to protect the institution, because officials depend on curated datasets to demonstrate competence, and these curated datasets produce the polished narratives that shape public belief.

The structure rewards leaders who deliver clean numbers and reassuring summaries, and this reward system generates a culture where inconvenient information remains unrecorded, unreported, or reframed, which means the public receives a version of reality shaped by institutional self-preservation rather than by an ethical commitment to accuracy.

The operational logic behind selective disclosure

Institutions treat information as an asset that must be managed with strategic precision, and this logic becomes visible in the patterns that define public reporting. Ministries publish graduation rates because these numbers affirm success, they release enrolment counts because they signal reach, and they highlight targeted investments because these metrics position the system as responsive and stable.

If they can, the same institutions withhold data that would reveal chronic service gaps, patterns of exclusion, resource deprivation, or disproportionate burdens carried by specific groups of students, and this separation between internal measurement and public disclosure exposes a system oriented toward reassurance rather than justice.

The historical record of curated truth

The residential school system offers a fully documented example of a state apparatus that generated extensive administrative data while suppressing the evidence that revealed its own violence. Administrators produced attendance sheets, discipline logs, inspection summaries, and financial reports, yet the information that demonstrated harm—mortality rates, communicable disease outbreaks, starvation, overcrowding—remained inside internal correspondence and departmental files rather than reaching the public. Medical officers documented lethal conditions, and their warnings circulated within the Department of Indian Affairs without altering policy or entering public debate.

The archival record shows that the government possessed detailed knowledge of the conditions inside the schools, and this knowledge remained unpublished because it contradicted the official narrative that the schools advanced the welfare of Indigenous children.

Today, in public education

British Columbia’s education system uses provincial databases, standardised attendance codes, designation categories, and district reporting structures that produce comprehensive internal visibility of student experience, and this internal visibility includes patterns of partial attendance, removal from class, safety-plan interventions, support allocation, and chronic absence.

A student’s daily presence is recorded in MyEdBC; a designated student’s funding and support category is stored in the same system; and districts submit this information to the Ministry through routine uploads. These data may support internal planning, resourcing, and evaluation, yet the public receives only aggregate figures that obscure disparities and may interrupt meaningful understanding.

This difference between internal measurement and public reporting reveals a choice about how the system wishes to be seen. The public receives the impression of stability, while the internal record may contain the details of instructional loss, fragmented support, and differential impact across disability categories.

My experience with attendance

When I requested my children’s attendance records, the receptionist paused and then told me, with quiet exhaustion, that she rarely has time to enter partial days, and her honesty confirmed what many families intuit without documentation: the official record of presence and absence reflects the pace of human survival, the conditions of the workday, and the weight carried by school staff rather than the lived reality of children who shift in and out of classrooms through dysregulation, overwhelm, or removal. Early pickups, safety-plan exits, and mid-day collapses can slip out of the record entirely, which means the official file often erases the very moments that define a child’s struggle.

I consider the opposite pattern as well, the possibility that overwhelmed staff select “present” when the child is wandering the hall, sitting in the office, or already on their way home, and I remember the years when the calls I made to the sick line far exceeded the days marked absent on the report, even though I never managed to call consistently.

Both tendencies—erasure and over-smoothing—enter the dataset, and together they produce a record of attendance that masks the fractures children experience every day.

Release the files

Every conversation with school staff reveals the emotional infrastructure behind attendance records, because record-keeping occurs between crises and the competing demands of a day that leaves no space for careful documentation. The numbers are shaped by exhaustion long before anyone in a Ministry office interprets them. Staff receive little incentive to refine these records because the province offers so little transparency, and without transparency there is no shared understanding that attendance data captures who receives access to instruction and who loses it. In this environment the record becomes something to complete rather than something to steward, and the gap between internal reliance on these numbers and the lived reality of the people entering them becomes a quiet structural rift.

Releasing disaggregated attendance data is the first step toward transforming this culture, because transparency establishes accuracy as a collective priority and affirms that the province values the truth of children’s instructional days.

Public disclosure elevates the importance of careful recording, and a shared commitment to honest measurement can shift attendance from a background obligation to an indicator of access, support, and equity. I imagine a system where staff feel supported rather than overwhelmed, where the province invests in consistency rather than opacity, and where families receive records that reflect experience rather than institutional bandwidth and political optics.

The predictable emergence of contradictory evidence

Families, advocates, educators, and analysts routinely encounter information that diverges from the official narrative of stability, because direct experience reveals patterns that the publicly released data leave unaddressed. Parents observe exclusion that appears in the record as ordinary absence; teachers manage repeated safety-plan removals that leave no imprint on provincial dashboards; districts document EA shortages internally while provincial reporting offers only broad categories that conceal these pressures.

The Exclusion Tracker created by BCEdAccess functions as a contemporary Bryce Report, not because the scale or nature of harm aligns with the historic violence of the residential school system, but because both documents reveal a structural pattern in how governments manage information about the children they fail.

The tracker gathers the experiences families navigate each day and renders them visible, and this community-generated archive illuminates the spaces where provincial reporting remains incomplete. Its existence demonstrates that when a system declines to release information that clarifies patterns of harm, the evidence emerges through the labour of those most affected, and this emergence signals a shift away from the era of uncontested institutional silence.

These discrepancies accumulate across years and eventually surface through FOI disclosures, independent research, investigative journalism, legal processes, and community testimony, and together they form a counter-archive that challenges the curated narrative maintained by the state. Bureaucracies consistently underestimate the force of this accumulation, yet it expands with every documented experience and operates as a parallel record that presents its own coherent account of the system’s impact.

The erosion of institutional credibility

Each instance of withheld information contributes to a slow erosion of trust, because communities see the gap between internal knowledge and public reporting. When ministries decline to publish cross-tabulated attendance data, when districts reshape exclusion as parental preference, or when agencies rely on aggregates that conceal disparities, the public recognises the pattern. This recognition shifts how people interpret future statements, because they understand that the institution communicates selectively, and this loss of credibility becomes a structural challenge far larger than any communications strategy can soothe.

The certainty of eventual disclosure

Information withheld today surfaces tomorrow through FOI requests, research findings, leaked documents, legal proceedings, and community testimony, and these mechanisms operate independently of institutional preference. The pressure to understand public systems intensifies each time a community experiences harm that the official data omit. The histories of residential schools, child welfare, and public education all show that hidden information eventually emerges, and the administrative decision to limit transparency delays accountability without preventing it.

The need for transparent stewardship

A responsible public system requires detailed, disaggregated data that reveal patterns of access, exclusion, resource distribution, and unmet need, because meaningful accountability depends on visibility. Transparent stewardship aligns internal knowledge with public disclosure, strengthens community trust, and honours the lived realities of the students the system claims to serve. A system that values children must value accurate information about their educational conditions, because justice requires illumination rather than silence.