How Schools are Building Custom Data Solutions to Support Student Success

Student Success Systems

Being an educator in 2025 is extraordinarily demanding. Teachers and leaders navigate countless responsibilities every day: designing engaging lessons, implementing targeted interventions, nurturing relationships with students and families, and adapting to new technologies. In the midst of these complex tasks, what gets educators up in the morning? Knowing they can make a real difference in students’ lives—setting students up not just to graduate, but to thrive in whatever path they choose.

This focus on student success is intuitive. But with hundreds or thousands of students at a single school, it can be challenging to identify students in need of support and to provide the appropriate support to each student. Educators, counselors, and school leaders want to spend their limited time building relationships and providing meaningful support rather than combing through messy, disconnected data to figure out who is struggling or how to group students effectively.

Student success systems offer a research-backed solution. This evidence-based approach leverages data, relationships, and student-centered mindsets to systematically address achievement patterns and meet individual student needs. These systems bring together key indicators—including attendance, behavior, course grades, and measures of well-being–to provide schools with a unified system that integrates and strengthens student support efforts.

Technology Pain Points

Many commercially available technology solutions meant to support student success—including Student Information Systems, Learning Management Systems, early warning platforms, and intervention tracking tools—come with significant limitations that prevent schools from effectively implementing student success systems.

Our team spoke with more than 50 educators, researchers, and technology developers to understand how these existing technologies both bolster and limit student success work. We identified nine common pain points that schools and districts encounter, regardless of their size, location, or resources.

These challenges include student data scattered across multiple platforms that don’t communicate with each other, complex interfaces that require extensive training, rigid systems that are challenging to customize for local needs, and limited ability to track whether interventions improve student outcomes.

District-Led Innovations

In these same conversations, we also learned that many schools and districts are not waiting for the perfect tools—they’re building their own.

District-led innovations (DLIs) range from simple spreadsheet trackers to sophisticated dashboards with integrated intervention management. What they share is a commitment to putting student needs first and designing systems that align with educator workflows.

Our new District-Led Innovation Showcase highlights five examples from across the country:

These solutions show the importance of grounding tools in research, building cross-functional teams that understand both technology and education, and designing systems that integrate into educators’ daily workflows.

While we celebrate these examples, we recognize that homegrown systems may not be the right approach for every district. Our goal in sharing these examples is to bridge the gap between what schools need and what the market provides. We hope to inspire better commercial solutions and more meaningful partnerships between educators and technology developers.