Three Ways PowerSchool Connected Intelligence K-12 Transforms Education

As a technology leader, imagine your educators notice a possible negative trend in a student or class’s performance. They can sense where it’s heading, but they need data to clearly see why or how it’s happening. The problem is that you’re unable to give them data-backed answers because of a lack of access, integrations, and data security. That data is stuck in multiple products from separate edtech vendors. 

PowerSchool Connected Intelligence K-12 is the first fully managed Data as a Service (DaaS) platform for K-12 education. It helps school districts remove data silos by making the most efficient, effective use of the massive amounts of data generated across their source systems to maximize student outcomes.

While Connected Intelligence offers a myriad of use cases, three key benefits have emerged that are empowering school districts of all sizes.  

“Like Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions that eliminate the need for organizations to install, run, manage, and maintain software applications on their own hardware, Data as a Service removes the burden of data storage, management, processing, and operations to PowerSchool’s fully managed, secure platform. This accelerates the pace of innovation for education agencies with built-in stringent data security, governance, and privacy,” says Shivani Stumpf, Group Vice President, New Solutions, PowerSchool. 

Connected Intelligence is powered by Snowflake, a single, global platform that powers the Data Cloud.  

“Connected Intelligence mobilizes K-12 education data to drive insights and innovation for educators. Ultimately this leads to improved learning, opportunities, and social mobility for the world’s greatest asset—our children. Snowflake is proud to partner with mission-focused organizations like PowerSchool where our technology empowers the education space with scale, connectivity, and security around data,” Snowflake’s Chief Technology Officer for Global Public Sector Winston Chang said. 

Here are three ways that Connected Intelligence is transforming K-12 education.   

School districts have emerged as one of the most popular and vulnerable targets for cyberattacks. They possess valuable personal data from employees, students and families, and typically lack adequate cybersecurity funding and resources in the education sector. 

With an increase in ransomware, phishing attacks, and data breaches targeting K-12 schools and districts, cybersecurity threats have shifted from a potential worst-case scenario to an everyday reality. As evidence of the costs, it takes an average of 287 days to recover from a ransomware attack, which is now the most common type of publicly disclosed cyber incident at U.S. schools. Some school districts are even paying 334% more for cybersecurity insurance this year. 

PowerSchool is leading the industry in making student, staff, and school data as secure as possible with stringent, hardened security protocols. Connected Intelligence enhances data security by: 

• Eliminating legacy methods of storing and sharing data that pose security risks and volume constraints 

• Providing a robust backup solution that can help maintain business continuity to combat cybersecurity threats 
• Offering a secure and efficient architecture to provide a new way to collaborate with authorized internal stakeholders and external agency partners  
• Protecting the security and integrity of the data and applications by investing heavily in industry-leading security protocols, security by design, end-to-end encryption, third-party penetration testing, intrusion detection, auditing, and mandatory training 
• Leveraging built-in data security and privacy features of our underlying technology platform, Snowflake  

“The dichotomy between needing broader access to data for driving more timely data-informed decisions and a heightened need for data governance has accelerated the need for a highly secure, modernized, turnkey platform purpose-built for K-12 that brings together authorized data sets and necessary operational tools, all in one place, for democratizing access in the most secure way possible,” says Stumpf. 

Districts across the U.S. have shared with us a strong need for on-demand and more real-time access to their data.  

As an example, one district has schools using disparate student information systems. They needed a modernized solution for unifying access across these different systems that all house critical student data. They also needed to securely share data with their external partners—including intervention, assessment, and special education service providers—every four hours in a way that solves their data governance challenges so they can authorize data access with the ability to monitor usage.  

They decided to migrate off their current self-hosted servers because of the high cost to procure new hardware and a desire to move to a modernized secure cloud solution for all their district data. These factors led them to partner with PowerSchool on Connected Intelligence, which solves these challenges while providing them data unification, downstream integrations, data governance, and secure access. 

Other districts have come to PowerSchool looking for ways to store large troves of historical data. One partner district had upwards of 20 years of history for legal, federal, and ad hoc requests. Archiving this data within their SIS was not desirable as it would negatively impact the performance of the system. In addition, they needed a solution to archive various student IEPs and other special education files. Moving their SIS data to Connected Intelligence helps them achieve their current operational objectives with the opportunity to expand in the future by unifying all their data in one secure platform. 

“School districts are constantly switching from one transactional system to another and are looking for ways to increase collaboration with after-school program partners, ESL, tutoring, intervention program, social services, and other partners. As they bring in new systems to further education outcomes, having timelier access to authorized data in a ready-to-use fashion becomes table stakes to run district operations successfully,” says Stumpf. 

Connected Intelligence allows districts to bring together all PowerSchool and non-PowerSchool data sources, such as student information system (SIS), learning management system (LMS), special education, HR, and finance data, as well as structured and unstructured data sets. With easy access to siloed data, district leaders are far better equipped to address policy questions, direct resources, and better support students along their education and workforce journeys.  

One PowerSchool customer—a large district with more than 80 data sources—will utilize Connected Intelligence for data consolidation, access, integrations, and governance for their whole child analytics, talent and ERP executive dashboards, and research projects. 

Another PowerSchool customer, a data-savvy private school, plans on using Connected Intelligence to unify data across their current and legacy SIS, assessment platform, LMS, finance system, and HR system to enable on-demand access for downstream integrations, ad hoc querying, research projects, AI/ML modeling, and operational and analytical reporting. Additionally, they want the ability to make analytical decisions based on website user behavior using their Google Analytics data. Google Analytics has implemented data retention policies that will limit their ability to access historical data and data thresholds resulting in data sampling within reports.  

The combination of both problems—and not having a solution for existing and future collected data—limits their ability to optimize their student enrollment and consequently their budgets. PowerSchool Connected Intelligence’s fully managed platform will help solve all these challenges, allowing the school to drive data-driven decision-making across all functions to maximize student outcomes.   

“COVID-19, as an example, has exacerbated the need for policymakers and researchers to understand the mental, physical, academic, social, and emotional impacts on students, staff, and communities,” says Stumpf. “Unifying, integrating, and enabling near-real-time access using Connected Intelligence by PowerSchool to historic, current, and future data that was either previously unavailable or underutilized will help inform policy and investment both at the state and district levels required to rectify the decline in post-secondary enrollment rates nationally, measure and act on learning loss long-term, and meet each student where they are by providing personalized supplemental learning opportunities.”