Catch them being good.
GoodCatch is the school behavior platform that makes recognition the path of least resistance. Teachers log a positive moment in three taps — silently, mid-class — and the app turns restorative documentation into the district paperwork, reports, and certificates educators currently do by hand.
Built by a classroom educator. FERPA-first architecture. No student data is ever used to train AI models.
🧪 Try the clickable prototype → (fictional students, demo data only)
At a demo of an early prototype, teachers joked and reached for the negative button — nobody asked how to record the positive. That instinct is why GoodCatch exists. If the software makes documentation easy and recognition an afterthought, it becomes a surveillance tool. We built the opposite.
— The founding observation, from a Birmingham classroom
Why GoodCatch
Five things no other behavior platform does
PBIS (Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports) is the U.S. Department of Education–backed behavior framework used in more than 25,000 American schools — the national standard for school behavior. It lives or dies on whether data gets captured and whether positives outnumber correctives. GoodCatch is designed around both — at the moment of entry, not in an admin report after the fact.
Three taps or your voice
Tap student → tap value → save. Silent, one-handed, mid-class — about eight seconds. Voice dictation for hallway moments and planning periods. If logging isn't nearly instant, it doesn't happen.
Positive-first by design
Recognition is the big default button; a corrective takes a deliberate extra step. Every teacher privately sees their own recognition-to-correction ratio against a research-aligned target. Documentation is never blocked — but recognition always leads.
One-tap AI outputs
Student of the Week certificates, monthly PBIS team reports with equity views, positive notes home, and a Friday summary for every teacher — generated from actually-logged moments, ready to print or send.
Coaching, not surveillance
When correction is needed, a restorative flow asks what the behavior is reaching for and surfaces two or three matched strategies from a cited, human-vetted library. Coaching ideas — never a diagnosis.
It notices — then drafts the response
GoodCatch reads the school's own logged moments and speaks up unprompted: re-teaches doubling in the cafeteria, a student with eleven recognitions and no certificate yet, kids nobody has logged at all. Then it acts — drafting the responding initiative on the Plan page, placed on a conflict-free date, ready for the team to accept in one tap.
How it works
From a hallway moment to the data binder
GoodCatch sits on top of the work schools already do — it doesn't add a system, it removes the paperwork between teachers and the framework they've already adopted.
Capture in seconds
Three-tap silent logging or voice dictation. The app auto-tags the school's own expectation values and the setting. Rosters import from a photo, a spreadsheet, or a pasted list.
Restorative response
Correctives run through a read-the-need flow with strategy cards drawn from trauma-informed care, restorative practices, culturally responsive teaching, and more — each cited, each vetted by humans.
Paperwork writes itself
The district's mandatory referral forms, behavior plans, and parent-contact logs are auto-generated from what the teacher already documented. The teacher never fills district paperwork by hand.
The team sees the pattern
Tier-support flags use the district's own criteria. Monthly PBIS reports land in the team's actual meeting rhythm — top infractions, hotspots by time and place, students trending toward support, equity mirror for the adults.
Built for the whole building
Tiered access, audited views
Access follows FERPA's legitimate-educational-interest standard: people see what their role requires, and every view is audit-logged.
Teachers
Full detail for their own students; recognition visibility for the rest of the building. A private weekly summary: who you recognized, who needs support, who to connect with next week.
PBIS teams & counselors
The full picture: tier flags with the documented trail behind them, intervention tracking, meeting-ready reports, and an exportable data binder packet every month.
Administrators
Schoolwide analytics by time, place, and behavior; escalation gates that enforce the documented prerequisites before any referral moves up; cumulative-day tracking with loud flags where the law requires them.
Privacy & trust
Student data is the most protected data in education. We built like it.
GoodCatch handles behavioral records that can become special-education evidence. That responsibility is the architecture, not a feature.
FERPA-first
Role-based access under the school-official exception, a signed Data Privacy Agreement per district (National DPA v2.2 supported), encryption at rest and in transit, and an audit log on every view.
No AI training on student data
AI providers operate under enterprise agreements designating them a school official — zero or short retention, and student data is never used to train models. Period.
COPPA-compliant posture
Written data-security program, retention limits, and data minimization, aligned to the amended COPPA rule in force since April 2026.
The app informs. Humans decide.
Exportable, timestamped, setting-tagged records can inform IEP, FBA, and 504 processes — but a human writes those documents. GoodCatch never auto-generates legal special-education content and never interprets a child.
Accessible by design
WCAG 2.1 AA target: high contrast, large tap targets, screen-reader labels. Voice input is an accessibility asset — and never the only path.
Demo mode until approval
No real student data enters the system before the district's data-privacy agreement is signed. Demos and training run on clearly-labeled fictional rosters.
The hard line: GoodCatch exists to close discipline gaps, not widen them. Equity disaggregation is a quiet mirror for the adults in the building — never a scoreboard on children.
The research
Research-aligned, honestly framed
Decades of classroom research associate higher praise-to-reprimand ratios with stronger engagement and less disruption. Training teachers toward a 5:1 ratio has increased academic engagement and reduced disruptive behavior (Cook et al., 2017), and a 151-classroom study found a positive linear relationship between praise ratios and on-task behavior — every improvement helps, with no magic threshold (Caldarella et al., 2020).
That's why GoodCatch nudges toward a ratio target rather than claiming a validated cutoff (Sabey, Charlton & Charlton, 2019). Many districts already mandate positive-interaction ratios in written policy. GoodCatch is the first platform that operationalizes one at the point of entry — where the interaction actually happens.
The equity work is grounded the same way. Schools most often punish the students with the greatest academic, social, and emotional needs — Noguera's landmark analysis (2003) called for discipline realigned with the educational mission, and Green's review of district discipline policies (2021) documents how far most policies still sit from prevention and equity. GoodCatch's equity mirror and restorative flows put that scholarship into practice, and its coaching library draws on the culturally relevant pedagogy tradition founded by Ladson-Billings (1995).
Cook, C. R., et al. (2017). Journal of Positive Behavior Interventions · Caldarella, P., et al. (2020). Educational Psychology · Sabey, C. V., Charlton, C., & Charlton, S. R. (2019) · Noguera, P. A. (2003). Theory Into Practice · Green, A. L., et al. (2021). Journal of Positive Behavior Interventions · Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). American Educational Research Journal.
Company
Built in the classroom, not for it
GoodCatch is a product of 4 Black Centuries LLC, an education-technology company founded by Eli M. Davis — a special-education teacher and Ph.D. candidate at the University of South Carolina — who built the first prototype for his own middle school in Birmingham, Alabama, because the behavior framework his school believed in was drowning in paper.
The company's premise is simple: the tools schools use shape how adults see children. Software that makes punishment easy and recognition hard teaches a building to watch for the worst. GoodCatch is engineered — mechanically, at the level of which button is biggest — to help adults catch students being good.
- Company
- 4 Black Centuries LLC
- Founder
- Eli M. Davis · Ph.D. candidate, University of South Carolina
- Experience
- 28 years with people with disabilities, since 1998 — group homes & the special-education classroom
- Training
- B.A. Psychology & graduate-level Applied Behavior Analysis, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
- Founded
- 2023 · Alabama
- Headquarters
- Leeds, Alabama
- Focus
- School behavior support software (PBIS)
- Status
- Pre-launch · 2026–27 pilot
Good questions
The first three questions people ask
What's in the teacher's hand?
The phone already in their pocket. GoodCatch is a mobile-first app — three silent taps mid-class, voice when hands are free. No new hardware, no cart of devices, no login ritual between a teacher and a good moment.
What does it cost?
A simple subscription — school and district pricing settled in conversation during the pilot year. No per-feature nickel-and-diming, and the price will always reflect what it replaces: the hours of documentation, reports, and certificates educators currently produce by hand.
Can a teacher's bias drive what gets "GoodCaught"?
Yes — bias rides into every behavior system, including this one. The difference is that GoodCatch is built to make it visible: recognition leads by design, every teacher privately sees their own recognition patterns, and schoolwide equity views show the adults — never the children — where curiosity is being read as defiance or inattention. Bias becomes data the team can see and change, instead of a habit nobody has to look at.
Get in touch
Bring GoodCatch to your building
We're piloting with a Birmingham, Alabama middle school for the 2026–27 school year and speaking with schools and districts about what comes next. If recognition-first behavior support sounds like your building, we'd love to talk.
hello@goodcatchapp.com