September 16, 2025
Eli Pristoop, Director of Attainment Analytics, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching
Along with supportive relationships, student-centered mindsets, and strategic improvement actions, holistic, actionable data are essential to realizing the promise of student success systems. While a district or school’s core student information system can often provide the data and visualizations that student success teams use for reflection and tracking, many districts are also developing their own tools for this purpose. A new publication from Digital Promise, Innovating for Student Success: District-Led Innovation Showcase, highlights some common motivations among districts who invest in developing their own tools, features five examples of custom-built tools, and summarizes some of the cross-cutting lessons from districts that have gone this route.
Based on a comprehensive field scan, Digital Promise identified nine common pain points that districts consistently grapple with when seeking to implement technology products to facilitate their student success systems work:
They then highlight some of the solutions districts have developed in response to these challenges, including from our very own GRAD Partnership community. These solutions cover the spectrum of complexity and cost, ranging from homegrown spreadsheet tools to custom multi-faceted platforms developed in partnership with technology vendors. The publication includes summaries, artifacts, screenshots, and in some cases, videos from schools and systems, including from Demopolis High School, Colorado Springs Schools District 11, New Visions for Public Schools, Lowell Public Schools, and Lynwood Unified School District.
While the scan includes many important insights, some of the key lessons for districts include:
- The importance of incorporating research-backed frameworks into the tool, for example in flagging thresholds of risk
- Designing systems or add-ons in a manner aligned with the existing workflows of educators to support the day to day practices of student success teams
- Leaving room for identifying groups of students that could benefit from a common-intervention, in addition to the student by student views that aid in individual identification and interventions
- Integrating structures for tracking interventions to go along with the student indicator data
Jenny Bradbury, formerly of Digital Promise, expands on some of the key considerations for technology supports in service of student success systems in an episode of the Data Magic podcast.
Another member of our community, Washoe County School District in Nevada, was also recently recognized for their work to develop and use innovative technology in service of keeping students on the path toward graduation. The Council of Great City Schools cited them with the “Informing Progress in Urban Education” award in connection to the development and use of a tool they called Insight; an early-warning system that uses machine learning and advanced data science techniques to provide early identification of students at-risk of not graduating. Congratulations to the WCSD Research Team!
As the multiple learning forums within the GRAD Partnership grow, including the recently launched Student Success District Network, we seek to facilitate opportunities for school systems with shared challenges to learn from one another regarding not only data systems, but a much broader set of relevant topics as well. We hope the resources developed and highlighted by Digital Promise can spur your work, and we hope you take advantage of opportunities within the GRAD Partnership learning communities to connect directly with school and district innovators whose work you want to learn more about.