The data’s all there. The shape is the problem.

Canvas’s default surface is the course. Click a course, see that course’s assignments, grades, and announcements. Useful when you’re a teacher administering one course, or a student doing the work for one course. Less useful when you’re a parent trying to triage which of seven courses, across two or three kids, needs attention before dinner.

The “global” views Canvas offers — the calendar, the grades roll-up — are afterthoughts. They lack filters that match how parents think (no “just the missing ones,” no “just this term so far,” no “just this kid” when the household has three). And they don’t roll across kids at all — each child’s account is its own silo, with its own login.

There’s also no “I’ve handled this” layer. Canvas tells you the submission state. It doesn’t track the parent-side of the conversation: did you talk to your kid about that grade? Did you email the teacher? Are you waiting on a redo? All of that lives in the parent’s head, fragmented across text messages and dinner conversations.

None of this is Canvas’s fault. It does its job for the role it was built for. Pearsight is the layer for the role Canvas was never going to serve — and the work of building it was mostly the work of structuring the same data differently.