Our Focus for 2024-25: Empowering Educators and Families to Maximize the Learning Journey for Every Student

As we embrace the fall, educators, students, and families are getting into the school year rhythm. The magic of this time of year is that while summer gave us a chance to pause and dream, we now have a new sense of clarity and purpose for the coming year.??

?Recently, we had a chance to celebrate our anticipation for this school year with more than 800 educators from over 12 countries at PowerSchool’s annual EDGE conference—a forum to gather and discuss how we can empower each and every student, teacher, caregiver, and administrator with technology and Responsible AI.??

?At EDGE, we shared our annual Education Focus Report, which features input from our community of over 7,200 Public School Districts and Boards, 2,500 charter schools, and 3,000 private schools who leverage our tools to support over 60 million students globally to distill their learning priorities. We also talked about how we are innovating across PowerSchool to provide a holistic platform for learning — and several guests joined us to talk about what that looks like on the ground in their own districts.?????

?This year’s report reflects the balancing act that educators are facing today between modern and traditional education—and how they must address urgent issues while boldly shaping the future of schooling. Here are some insights from the report and several innovative leaders who are shaping the future of education.??

AI offers an incredible opportunity to provide personalized support for learning.?

Our Education Focus Report shows a dramatic uptick in AI sentiment — 70% of district leaders believe AI can enhance teaching and learning, up from 53% in 2023. Sixty percent of school leaders and educators believe AI can enhance teacher practice and development.????

To talk about the potential for data and AI in schools, we welcomed Kerry Callahan, superintendent of Western Placer Unified School District in Lincoln, California, and Jason Price, the district’s board president, to the EDGE stage. They discussed the importance of unifying a district’s data estate and the potential of AI to provide a personalized experience that supports everyone.??

One of the uses they discussed was particularly meaningful for me. Superintendent Callahan shared how often students are at home with homework to do, but without anyone there to help them. Students in this situation are more likely to struggle or just give up and go do something else instead. Imagine if they were able to ask an AI assistant for help understanding an assignment or solving an equation.???

Our AI tools can also help districts reduce chronic absenteeism, which over half of our respondents identified as a significant issue. However, data-driven family engagement tools, like PowerSchool Attendance Intervention, can significantly improve family communication and reduce absences. In fact, in a study from Johns Hopkins University, PowerSchool Attendance Intervention was shown to decrease chronic absenteeism and increase elementary attendance by 2+ days.???

We believe there is great potential in personalized education to support students and to drive engagement. Think of how personalized your own cell phone and devices are to you, and how disoriented you might feel if you were to trade phones with someone for a day. Everything on that phone — all your apps and services, all your data and accounts, everything is personalized for you.???

What if we can offer that level of personalization in education? How much more engaged could students be? How could education-focused apps and services be used to understand where students are spending their time, or what they are most interested in? How can we harness them to address acute problems like absenteeism?? ??

A tool like this could level the playing field for all. This is why we’re working so hard on PowerBuddy, which brings this kind of transformation not just to learning, but to teaching, professional development, administration, budgeting and more with AI-powered assistants that reach across the education continuum.???

Integrating systems and data provides game-changing insights. ???

Districts everywhere are facing budgetary concerns, and the data that school systems already manage has incredible potential to bring fresh insights to strategic decisions. Yet today most systems are fragmented, meaning useful data cannot be connected or appropriately analyzed. ??

Michael Gaal, who is the superintendent of Colorado Springs School District, as well as David Koenig, chief of data science at Colorado Springs, joined us to talk about how they are bringing together engagement, student safety, cyber security, AI readiness, and financial and planning data to measure the impact of every dollar they are investing.??

Their vision is to put the tools in place to inform strategy and to be predictive instead of looking at data from the rearview mirror. With a platform that can integrate the district’s data holistically, Colorado Springs has been able to obtain a single source of truth — a timely data feed customized with KPIs, metrics and goals to inform strategy and measure outcomes. ??

Using PowerSchool Connected Intelligence to analyze the district’s budget, they were able to identify $10 million that could be reallocated toward the needs of classrooms and students. This year alone, they were able to take half of that money and invest in teachers.???

From the district, that intelligence flows to teachers and students too. Teachers in Colorado Springs are now able to start setting goals for improvement down to the individual student level from 12th grade to kindergarten.??

Another great example of data informed decision making is the State of Alabama’s use of PowerSchool Student Analytics and PowerSchool MTSS in creating a workflow management system for interventions that helped identify students who needed reading support.???

Alabama educators were able to use these integrated tools to communicate with stakeholders and monitor progress, which was the unlock for improving student reading scores state-wide. At EDGE, we highlighted the impact Stacy Royster and the Alabama State Department of Education drove this year, including the news that 91 percent of third grade students in Alabama tested at or above reading level! It’s clear that with the right tools to make data-informed decisions, we can see remarkable progress in academic achievement and student success!??

To help education leaders have similar success with interventions, PowerSchool Behavior Support— part of the Student Success Cloud—analyzes real-time behavior data to track student and staff performance over time. This is the only evidence-based behavior solution proven to reduce suspensions and referrals and increase school positivity.??

Uruguay has taken learning technology national.????

During Covid, the importance of having these digital tools that could prevent interruptions in education became all too evident. Uruguay became the Latin American country with the least learning loss, and Schoology Learning was an essential piece in this achievement. Today, according to the UNICEF Global Kids Online survey, Schoology is the fourth most used social network by children and adolescents in Uruguay, behind YouTube, WhatsApp and TikTok, confirming its importance as a fundamental tool in our educational landscape. Uruguay is also the only nation to have successfully deployed a learning management system across the entire country.???

At the EDGE conference, we were excited to welcome Mauro Carballo of Centro Ceibal, Uruguay, to discuss the country’s leadership in education technology. Uruguay provides every student and teacher with a device, and they use technology to facilitate teacher training and new programs like teaching English and computational thinking.???

They also work toward maximizing their data. Using data from Schoology as well as other networks and platforms, Uruguay is working on ways to visualize that data and make it available at different levels to help teachers make education more personalized, administrators make better decisions, and to help the country’s Ministry of Education make public policies.??

This example demonstrates how critical communication is between schools, students, and families. That's why we launched our next-generation communications platform for parents and students, MyPowerHub. The platform consolidates all the essential tools for parents to facilitate their child's educational progress through a single, seamless interface. MyPowerHub users have centralized access to school systems, reports, and student progress in just a few clicks, with a customized view for educators, students, and parents.??

Our commitment to transforming education.? ??

Of course, implementing the appropriate tools and interventions would not be possible without the right educators and school staff in place to support them. As we know, that’s a challenge for many schools and districts today. This year UNESCO’s Global Report on Teachers showed that 44 million more teachers are needed globally.????

Leaders need tools to recruit and assess candidates more efficiently, offer flexible professional learning, coaching and mentoring to help teachers and school staff navigate their evolving profession. PowerSchool's Talent Recruitment & Retention Cloud helps them do just that by leveraging streamlined?recruitment processes, a?modern candidate experience, advanced data?analytics, and the ability to transform real-time instructional coaching data into personalized goals and?professional?development?recommendations.???

We’re proud to share that these talent & HR tools have been adopted by over 4,000 customers, including 12 Departments of Education to improve recruitment, hiring, and professional development for a modern education workforce??

Our vision is to transform education using innovative technology that truly supports personalized education for every student around the world, a mission that would not be possible without educators and families.???

As we embark on a new school year, PowerSchool will continue to work with educators to transform education for all — and develop our platform and tools to support those real world needs.???