Why Building a Data-Driven Culture is Critical for K-12 Education

I spend a lot of time meeting with K-12 leaders from all sizes and types of schools and districts, and one of the biggest challenges they face today is with data management and accessibility. 

Schools often have too many data sources to begin with, and they are rarely connected, which makes it difficult to pull analytics together to inform decisions. Yet a data driven culture is the key to unlocking the insights school leaders need to support educators and students and improve education outcomes. 

As we learned from our 2023 Education Focus Report, 60 percent of educators identified “connecting data across systems” as a top 2023 district education technology priority.

This is why PowerSchool is dedicated to providing schools and districts with a complete data platform. PowerSchool Connected Intelligence K-12—the first fully managed Data as a Service (DaaS) platform built specifically for K-12—allows educators to fully maximize their disparate data sets. Connected Intelligence P20W is a platform that allows education and government agencies to securely unify, integrate, and access all source system data in a state-specific data cloud. 

PowerSchool helps districts achieve the data strategy that’s right for them. District technology teams and researchers utilize Connected Intelligence K-12 to secure all their disparate data in the cloud. Now they can access and manage all data in one location, run ad hoc reporting, and utilize AI/ML workflows to fully harness the value of their data.   

Here’s how Connected Intelligence K-12 is meeting four unique data needs for schools and districts:

Educators want and need to see data from multiple sources. These sources include their student information system, learning management system, assessment platform, special education management system, and data on behavior and social and emotional learning.  

After working closely with hundreds of school leaders and collaborating on how they utilize data, we understood that connecting disparate data sources would be a game-changer for education. 

When we piloted Connected Intelligence K-12 with large and small districts, they immediately recognized the benefits of adopting a securely governed Data as a Service platform that provides seamless data collaboration with internal stakeholders and external partners, and ensures the right people have the data they need, when they need it. 

Connected Intelligence K-12 also provides data tools that offer crucial insights to improve student outcomes and facilitate data-driven decision-making via ad hoc reporting.

Ad hoc report created using Connected Intelligence.

According to the U.S. Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), K-12 schools are increasingly targets of cyberattacks given the many legacy systems and lack of IT resources across education. In fact, PowerSchool protects our customers against over 1 billion cyber-attacks each year—and that represents only a fraction of the technology in use by K-12 schools.  

It’s critical that districts have a place to store, secure, and access their data. Connected Intelligence is the only data cloud platform that serves as a secure data location for K-12 schools—whether for archiving data, data security as a backup, or as a foundation for an AI strategy.  

Connected Intelligence K-12 provides schools and districts with a purpose-built, high-performance, secure PK-12 data cloud for their data lake, data storage, data management, data integration, ad hoc reporting, and AI/ML workflows with built-in security, data privacy, and governance.

PowerSchool’s significant investment in advanced security technologies, including static and dynamic code scanning, best-of-breed Web Application Firewalls, and more than 30 annual penetration tests, reinforces our unwavering commitment to providing unparalleled protection and trust to districts and schools. Here are additional ways we’re ensuring data security for our customers: 

• As a signatory of the Student Privacy Pledge 2020, PowerSchool adheres to all applicable state, province, and federal regulations and goes beyond those by independently verifying our security management system annually to third-party audited, internationally recognized standards for security management systems 
• PowerSchool has achieved the ISO:27001 certification and SOC2 Type 2—the gold standard data security certification for business service providers.  
• PowerSchool  partnered with the Consortium for School Networking (COSN) on their recently rolled-out K-12 Community Vendor Assessment Tool (K-12CVAT)  
• PowerSchool is an active partner of 1EdTech, focusing on industry standards, interoperability, and data privacy and security best practices 
• PowerSchool products have been vetted and certified as TrustEd Apps by 1Edtech, based on the organization’s rigorous data and privacy rubric

Connected Intelligence K-12 connects a district’s K-12 historical data, live transactional data (such as SIS, assessments, HR, Finance, surveys, and NSC assessment data), third-party data (labor market data and data warehouse analytics), and all other data sets, revolutionizing how school systems access and use data.  

Through seamless data collaboration with internal stakeholders and external partners, PowerSchool provides securely governed data sharing while ensuring all stakeholders have timely data access. 

PowerSchool’s other Data as a Service tool, Connected Intelligence P20W, further opens up the spectrum of data that schools and districts can analyze. The integrated platform brings the power of AI and ML to structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data, including data held by government agencies. The advanced data processing capabilities in the cloud empower users with secure, on-demand access without limiting the number of entities of data to be analyzed.  

The solution breaks down data silos with a state- and district-specific data lake, data warehouses, connectors, integrations, artificial intelligence, and machine learning tools for predictive analytics and ad hoc querying.

Connected Intelligence K-12 provides data security, governance, and privacy capabilities to address stakeholders’ data needs, including researchers, state and district agency decision-makers, policymakers, educators, students, families, and communities, for easing the transition from education to industry.

AI is on everyone’s mind and priority list—for good reason. The potential of responsible, equitable AI to truly personalize education lies in seeing more context about each student and gaining better, actionable insights. However, AI is only as powerful as the data it has access to. 

That’s why, unlike other edtech companies, PowerSchool brings a modern, differentiated approach that brings AI to the data. It’s not about pushing that data out to AI resources or farming out data to a third-party AI provider, which can put data privacy and security at risk.  

Connected Intelligence K-12 provides a safe foundation for our customers’ AI strategy. We provide AI/ML workflows on top of their data, which is all housed securely in Connected Intelligence K-12.  

This combination of AI and a data-driven culture will unlock personalized education at scale in K-12. For the first time in history, educators will have tools to create personalized learning pathways based on each student’s needs, predict which students are on track or at risk of falling behind, and create equitable access to learning opportunities.