Continuous Improvement Plans: How PowerSchool Aids K-12 Improvement Strategies

The most effective K-12 schools embrace a commitment to ongoing evaluation, reflection, and refinement of their practices. This relentless pursuit of improvement directly benefits students by enhancing their learning experiences and, in turn, strengthens the community culture by fostering an expectation of excellence and innovation.  

Continuous improvement also helps schools and districts: 

• Adapt to shifting trends and patterns  
• Ensure equity 
• Enhance teaching and learning  
• Maximize resources  
• Increase engagement among stakeholders  
• Foster a communal growth mindset  
• Meet accountability and regulatory requirements  

PowerSchool Continuous Improvement Plans is a new PowerSchool Analytics & Insights solution. This tool provides a streamlined, digital, data-driven approach to supporting continuous improvement planning efforts. 

PowerSchool Continuous Improvement Plans supports school and district plans through pre-built, configurable improvement workflows that make analysis easy and actionable. Now districts can act quickly, see improvement faster, and communicate progress to stakeholders. 

In today’s complex education environment, school districts need greater access to data and insights that inform the development and execution of all types of improvement plans.  

Too often, data to support these plans is siloed and spread across multiple disconnected data systems. Outdated, static, paper-and-pencil systems increase the workload on school staff to document and maintain required improvement plans and lack the security and protection of digital tools. Additionally, offline or siloed improvement plans are not easily shareable across all contributing and decision-making stakeholders, slowing down progress.  

PowerSchool’s Continuous Improvement Plans module provides an easy interface for what can be a troublesome task. Its flexible forms streamline the creation of many improvement plans, both large and small.  

The module’s interoperability with PowerSchool Analytics & Insights means this powerful tool directly connects your improvement plans with the necessary data needed to drive them, maximizing data-driven decision-making and minimizing effort. 

Continuous Improvement Plans also enables users to: 

• Access all data needed to inform plans in one single location  
• Track progress over time with data refreshes  
• Tailor each plan to fit a wide variety of needs with flexible form entry  
• Use a straightforward drag-and-drop form to delegate responsibilities  
• Easily adjust settings to share plans with appropriate stakeholders 
• Increase data security through a single platform 

PowerSchool Continuous Improvement Plans addresses more than just annual school improvement. The software can also support other school-based plans. Consider these situations, for example:  

• My district is seeing a dip in math achievement scores and wants to set a plan in motion to quantify improvements. 
• I need to see improvements in the number of positive behaviors exhibited by students in my classroom. 
• I suspect that our district will see an increase in teacher attrition over the coming years and need to plan and monitor retention efforts. 
• As a district, our goal is to more closely monitor the total number of students on a specific MTSS intervention and the rate at which they are moving off them. 
• As a school, we are seeing an increase in the number of student withdrawals and are putting a plan into effect to minimize this. 

Ultimately, every school and district decides the appropriate committee configuration to create and implement improvement plans. Roles that are often involved in continuous improvement planning include district-level administration and superintendents, elementary and secondary chiefs of schools, chief academic officers, instructional leadership, and school leadership (principals, etc.).  

The Pursuit of Excellence in K-12 Education 

Continuous improvement is a dynamic process that requires ongoing commitment, collaboration, and innovation from all members of the school community. With PowerSchool Continuous Improvement Plans, your district can say goodbye to paper trails, email threads, and spreadsheets. PowerSchool Analytics & Insights empowers districts to make analysis easy and actionable.