Exploring the Impact of AI in Education with PowerSchool’s CEO & Chief Product Officer

An item from a neo-liberal…  This one is an item from a business professor with little direct experience in education, but who believes free market economic principles are the answer to education’s (and pretty much all other society’s social) problems.

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SEP 27

Exploring the Impact of AI in Education with PowerSchool’s CEO & Chief Product Officer

		MICHAEL B. HORN

With just under 10 acquisitions in the last 5 years, PowerSchool has been active in transforming itself from a student information systems company to an integrated education company that works across the day and lifecycle of K–12 students and educators. What’s more, the company turned heads in June with its announcement that it was partnering with Microsoft to integrate AI into its PowerSchool Performance Matters and PowerSchool LearningNav products to empower educators in delivering transformative personalized-learning pathways for students. In this conversation with its CEO Hardeep Gulati and Chief Product Officer Marcy Daniel, they detail where PowerSchool is going with its AI plans—and just how much they think they can make productive personalization a reality for students and educators. There were lots of notable parts of the conversation, but I’ll highlight this one from Hardeep:

There could be a lot of good use of supplemental tutoring and supplemental content and they can go to Khan Academy and they can go to Excel and other systems, but they’re only doing that 1 hour in a week. If we really want to improve achievement, we’ve got to actually do that within the context of [students’] day-to-day learning. And that’s really a unique opportunity for PowerSchool because we are where they are doing their homework, we are the system where they’re getting the homework and we can now personalize the entire homework within that context.

As always, subscribers can listen to the conversation above, watch it below at YouTube, or read the transcript.

Michael Horn:

Welcome to the Future of Education. I’m Michael Horn and this is the show where we are dedicated to helping the world build education systems where every individual can build their passions and fulfill their human potential. And I am delighted because we don’t often get to be in-person when we have these conversations, but the folks at PowerSchool have graciously allowed me to be one of the keynotes at their conference here in Orlando, Florida. And so they’ve made available the CEO Hardeep Gulati and the Chief Product Officer, Marcy Daniel. And it’s just really good to be with you all in person. Thanks so much for doing this sit down.

Hardeep Gulati:

Thanks, Michael. Great to have you here, especially for somebody who really talks and has so much written about the things which we are really focused on, not just on the competency-based learning and other elements. You have really helped us show them the way in terms of the innovation. And thank you for taking the time to actually be at our user conference.

Morning Warmup

Michael Horn:

Oh, you bet. So, I mean, this is honestly a delight for me. And we often when we have these conversations, divide them up in four segments. We get our morning warm up, we go into our work cycle, we have some specials and then closing time so Hardeep you get to kick us off on the morning warmup. I think a lot of people, when they think about PowerSchool, they think of it as an SIS provider, student information systems, right. The origins in some ways, but from my perspective, it seems like you guys have grown into so much more, a much more complete set of solutions. And now obviously, you’re a publicly traded company. It’s a very different setting from maybe a decade ago. So in your words, how do you describe what PowerSchool is and what it’s evolved to be?

Hardeep Gulati:

Yeah. Thank you. And as I was sharing with you in the hallway, the PowerSchool journey has been a phenomenal journey.

Michael Horn:

Right.

Hardeep Gulati:

We’ve been around more than 25 years. We’ve always known to be the student information system leader, and we are still today almost more than 21 million students, which is almost one-third of the North American school districts leverage our SIS. But we are a lot more than that now. In fact, in the last eight years, we have grown from an SIS to a full end-to-end platform. All the different elements of student information cloud build on our SIS, but also our Personalized Learning cloud with Schoology, which again has more than 50 million students assessment and curriculum. We have our Student Success cloud with MTSS and behavior and special ed support. We have our Workforce Effectiveness and Workforce Recruitment cloud to help, really help school districts not just recruit teachers and onboard them, but also helping them with their professional development and then we take all the way into even the student workforce development? How do we really help with our Naviance product, with our college career readiness? So we now reach actually 50 million students. Almost 80% of the North American school districts actually leverage some of our capabilities. So we are really now a more holistic provider for all the different things the school districts might need.

Michael Horn:

So it’s holistic. It’s end to end, from back end to front end, and from really early learning all the way into college, essentially. That’s quite a reach. Against that backdrop, obviously, artificial intelligence, I don’t need to tell you, is an incredibly hot topic in education. It’s something we’re going to get into a little bit more in the details. But I guess I want to do sort of bigger picture because it’s such a hot topic right now. As you think about all of those things that PowerSchool is doing, how do you think about the vision for artificial intelligence with the roadmap that you have for Power School in the long run?

© 2023 Michael Horn