Emily Bailard and the arithmetic of showing up

Two days sounds like almost nothing. Two school days in a month can disappear among the errands, permission slips and small negotiations of family life. Repeat that pattern through a school year, however, and the arithmetic changes. Emily Bailard has built a company around the distance between those two ways of seeing the same calendar.

In a conventional 180-day school year, missing 18 days means missing a tenth of the available instruction. A family may remember each absence as a separate event. A school sees a running total. The opportunity for Bailard is in helping those accounts meet, while there is still time to change what happens next.

“Parents have a lot of misconceptions about attendance,” she said in 2023. Her work at EveryDay Labs takes that observation seriously. It asks how information reaches a household, how clearly it is understood and whether a parent has the resources to act on it. A beautifully populated database has limited conversational skills.

An avocado farm, a pool, a design studio

Bailard grew up on a small avocado farm in Carpinteria, on California’s coast. At Yale, she studied political science, graduated cum laude and captained the women’s water polo team. The farm and the pool offer a more interesting introduction than the usual procession of corporate job titles. They also belong to her documented life, rather than to a founder mythology assembled after the fact.

In 2002, while still a student, she worked as a research assistant at the Brookings Institution. Her professional career began at Bain & Company, advising large companies on subjects including strategy, customer loyalty and sales effectiveness. At The Bridgespan Group, she worked with nonprofits and foundations. Those were different clients with a shared managerial question: how does an organization turn its intentions into results?

She entered Stanford’s MBA program in 2007. During the summer of 2008 she worked at IDEO, contributing to an energy efficiency project. That September, Stanford named her one of five MBA students selected as 2009 Siebel Scholars, recognizing academic achievement, leadership and citizenship. She completed the degree in 2009 and also earned the Arjay Miller Scholar distinction.

The sequence matters because her later work crossed several professional borders. Political science, consulting, design and energy were all part of the route into education. There was no need to retrofit an inevitable destination onto it. Her experience was accumulating around organizations, customers and the choices people make when they encounter a piece of information.

The electricity bill comes to school

At Opower, Bailard worked on energy efficiency solutions that encouraged residential and commercial utility customers to save energy. She managed client implementations in Asia Pacific before taking on strategy and marketing responsibilities. The task included working with sales and product teams, deciding how to position the offering and how to bring it to customers.

By 2014, her thinking about personalized communication was explicit. Discussing the utility industry’s increasingly precise customer segmentation, she pointed to the importance of recommendations arriving at an appropriate moment. A sensible offer could still be poorly timed. Knowing a customer’s circumstances was part of making the message useful.

That is a recognizable problem in a family’s inbox. An instruction can be correct, official and entirely unhelpful if it arrives without context. Bailard’s career makes more sense when viewed through that practical concern than through the industry categories on a résumé. Electricity and education both involve institutions trying to communicate with people whose lives contain many competing demands.

From March 2015 to June 2018, she worked as a Social Venture Practitioner at Stanford’s Center for Social Innovation. She helped lead its social entrepreneurship program. Then she became CEO of EveryDay Labs, an organization built from Harvard professor Todd Rogers’s attendance research. She brought operating experience to a business whose central idea had already been tested.

Rogers and UC Berkeley researcher Avi Feller had studied attendance updates sent to families in ten San Mateo County school districts during 2015-16. Their intervention reduced absences among kindergarten through fifth-grade students by 8%, and chronic absence by 15%. Bailard was drawn to the evidence. She also recognized something familiar from Opower: feedback could change a recurring household behavior.

“We all think we’re better than average.”

Emily Bailard, on how families perceive attendance

A company built around the kitchen table

When Bailard took over in 2018, EveryDay Labs had three full-time employees. The organization had passed through earlier leaders, including Johannes Demarzi and Marc Laitin. Laitin, who had led product research and development at Opower, helped secure initial angel investment and brought Bailard into the company. The connection between the two businesses was personal as well as intellectual.

Taking research into districts meant building something that could keep operating after a study ended. Someone had to work with the data, deliver the communications, support customers and make the next contract possible. By September 2022, the organization had more than 40 full-time employees and ten part-time employees, delivering millions of interventions a year.

In 2021, it announced an $8 million Series A led by Rethink Impact, with participation from investors including Reach Capital, City Light Capital and others. The purpose was to scale its research-based communication tools. Bailard framed the funding around the needs of district leaders, students and families. The money supplied room to build; the attendance work supplied the reason.

One revealing design ambition concerned the most ordinary surface in a home: the refrigerator. Bailard described attendance letters as things families might want to keep on a kitchen table or post on a refrigerator. That is a demanding brief for an institutional letter. It has to remain legible after the envelope is opened and useful after the first glance.

The communications combine a child’s own attendance information with an explanation of why it matters. Printed mail has a role alongside text messages. Family support offers another layer. A reminder can prompt a parent to notice an accumulating problem; a practical conversation can help explain what is keeping it in place.

Before the red flag

Bailard has taken the prevention argument into public policy discussions. In September 2024, she presented to New Mexico legislators about attendance data and effective messaging. Her point concerned how schools distribute attention: universal strategies can receive too little investment while the most intensive interventions receive too much of the focus. Waiting for a severe attendance pattern narrows the available room to respond.

In an October 2024 article co-written with Rogers and EveryDay Labs research leader Mikia Manley, she made the case for reaching students with moderate absence patterns too. Many individual absences come from this larger group. The authors argued for repeated, personalized outreach and continued communication throughout the year, rather than treating the opening weeks as the whole attendance campaign.

Their analysis also described a relationship between missed days and lower academic performance. That association deserves care: a chart cannot explain every student’s circumstances. Still, it challenges the comfort of an administrative cutoff. A threshold helps an organization classify a problem. It cannot make the days before that threshold educationally weightless.

At a December 2024 discussion with family engagement and attendance leaders, Bailard described three parts of the company’s work: data and collaboration tools, professional learning for staff, and attendance communications. The audience also heard from Hedy Chang, Bibb Hubbard and Shadae Harris. Family-school relationships ran through the discussion, placing the software inside a wider practice of listening and support.

Her public biography adds a personal connection: her mother was a first-grade teacher and an inspiration to her. Bailard is also a parent. Those details do not substitute for evidence about an intervention. They give the institutional language a recognizable household setting, where a message has to compete with dinner, tomorrow’s arrangements and the search for a missing shoe.

One route to school, thousands of schools

In Menlo Park in 2024, Bailard spoke in support of changes to bike lanes on Middle Avenue. She said the changes had helped her eight-year-old begin biking to Oak Knoll School without an adult. Here was a different kind of attendance infrastructure: a route that made a morning journey possible with more independence. There was no dashboard required to describe the difference.

The anecdote belongs beside her professional work because it keeps the destination concrete. Getting to school involves streets, transport, calendars and family arrangements. A count of missed days may start a conversation about those things. The resulting improvement still has to happen in the world outside the attendance system.

In Louisiana, a seven-school-system pilot reported an average 11.5% reduction in the number of chronically absent students during 2024-25, equivalent to a 2.9 percentage-point improvement. The participating systems collectively recorded 137,722 additional school days. Bailard credited district leaders and staff. The report described the data as preliminary, a useful qualification when results travel beyond their original setting.

On March 4, 2026, Newsela announced it had acquired EveryDay Labs. The company would become part of Schoolytics by Newsela, connecting attendance improvement with academic data and tools. At the time of the announcement, EveryDay Labs reported serving over 4,000 schools, preventing 3.1 million absences and restoring more than 1.1 billion minutes of instruction.

For Bailard, the stated next step was to bring attendance and academic improvement tools together. The acquisition gave the work a new organizational home. It also made the original premise unusually plain: tools for a lesson depend on the student having an opportunity to take part in it.

Her career has moved from an avocado farm to university pools, consulting offices, utility customers and school districts. Across the later chapters, a recurring interest emerges in making ordinary patterns visible enough to act on. An electricity bill records a habit. A school calendar does too. For a family, the useful version of either is the one that helps with tomorrow.