October 1, 2026

Every district is sitting on a mountain of data. The question isn’t whether you have it. It’s whether the right people can actually use it. Too often, valuable information stays locked in siloed systems, accessible only to a handful of technical staff, while the educators who need it most are left waiting on a report that may or may not arrive in time to matter.

That’s the gap PowerSchool closes with two complementary solutions: Connected Intelligence and Analytics & Insights. One builds the foundation. The other puts it to work for everyone. And while each delivers real value on its own, the districts seeing the biggest impact are the ones using them together.

Here’s how to think about which fits your needs, and why “both” is often the right answer.

Start with the foundation: Connected Intelligence

Connected Intelligence is your unified, governed data foundation. Think of it as a data lake with Data-as-a-Service capabilities: a single place where information from your SIS, ERP, assessment, HR, finance, and other systems comes together, making trusted data from across your ecosystem accessible for reporting, analysis, and decision-making.

This solution is built for the technical people on your team. If you have data analysts, engineers, or IT staff who are comfortable working hands-on with data (and fluent in SQL), Connected Intelligence gives them the direct access they need to fully optimize it. They can join any data set, run ad hoc reporting on the fly, build real-time dashboards in their favorite BI tool, and stop wrestling with multiple extract tools just to answer a simple question.

It’s also where your governance and compliance story gets stronger. As a managed cloud data platform, Connected Intelligence enforces tighter security and FERPA-aligned privacy controls, reducing both risk and administrative overhead. It’s the natural home for archiving historical data from source systems to meet state and federal requirements, automating data exchange across agencies, and, when you’re ready, powering AI and machine learning on a centralized, trusted foundation. That foundation can extend beyond traditional data sources, enabling AI to unlock insights from documents such as policies, handbooks, IEPs, and meeting notes. The result is AI experiences that can draw on a richer picture of district information to provide more informed answers and recommendations.

One important note: Connected Intelligence isn’t used directly by non-technical staff like teachers, counselors, principals, or interventionists. But that doesn’t mean they’re left out. A technical employee can build outputs in Connected Intelligence that those staff members rely on every day. Which brings us to the other half of the equation.

Put it to work for everyone: Analytics & Insights

If Connected Intelligence is built for your technical team, Analytics & Insights is built for everyone else.

Analytics & Insights delivers the “right data” to the “right people” in real time through role-based dashboards. It empowers all your stakeholders, including teachers, principals, superintendents and assistant superintendents, accountability staff, interventionists, counselors, and student services, with the insights they need to act faster, lead with confidence, and measure what matters, from individual student outcomes to district-wide KPIs.

The value lies in the “role-based” experience. A superintendent needs to see trends across schools. A principal needs a pulse on their own campus. A teacher needs a clear view of the students in front of them. Analytics & Insights tailors what each person sees so they get exactly what’s relevant to their job. With features like Student Profiles, educators finally get a one-stop view that connects the dots between attendance, academics, assessments, behavior, and SEL, painting a richer “whole child” picture of every student.

The robust student data in Analytics & Insights is foundational to an effective MTSS process because it helps educators identify students who need support, understand the root causes of their challenges, and place them in the right interventions at the right time. Ongoing progress-monitoring data enables teams to measure whether interventions are working, adjust supports when needed, and ensure resources are directed where they can have the greatest impact. Without timely, reliable data, MTSS decisions become reactive rather than proactive, making it harder to improve student outcomes.

Just as importantly, it changes how work gets done. No more submitting a request to IT and waiting days for someone to pull data and build a report. Analytics & Insights transforms disparate data sets into meaningful, ready-to-use insights, freeing your technical team from the reporting treadmill and giving your educators the answers they need, when they need them.

Which one is right for you?

If you’re a technical leader who wants hands-on access to bring all your data sources together in one governed location, Connected Intelligence is your solution. If you lead a team of non-technical staff who need clear, role-based dashboards to do their jobs, Analytics & Insights is the answer.

But here’s the part that surprises people: the technical audience often wants Analytics & Insights, too.

Consider the CTO. They’re involved in virtually every software purchase, and they feel the constant pressure of stakeholders asking for data. It’s incredibly common for a technical leader to want out-of-the-box dashboards they can simply hand to their stakeholders, because that alleviates enormous pressure on their department. They no longer have to pull data together and build reports and dashboards from scratch. Analytics & Insights does that work for them. Wanting hands-on data access and wanting turnkey dashboards aren’t opposing goals, they often come from the very same person.

Why the biggest districts choose both

This is exactly why larger districts tend to invest in both solutions. Their technical leaders want to bring all their data together with hands-on access and full control. At the same time, their district leaders want to make sure every school (and every non-technical stakeholder) has the insights they need to support students. One need doesn’t cancel out the other. They’re two sides of the same strategy.

Together, Connected Intelligence and Analytics & Insights let you:

Turn data into action, not just reports. Connected Intelligence builds the governed foundation; Analytics & Insights turns it into role-based insights for every stakeholder.
Move from siloed systems to a single source of truth. Connected Intelligence unifies your sources; Analytics & Insights delivers consistent metrics and KPIs across the district.
Spend less time wrangling data and more time improving outcomes. Automating integration and data quality frees your people to focus on trends, risks, and opportunities.
Shift from reactive to proactive. Real-time integration plus longitudinal analysis helps you spot academic, attendance, behavioral, and operational issues before they grow.
Scale analytics across your whole organization. Everyone works from trusted data, and the right people get the right dashboards, reducing reliance on IT.

And as you look toward an AI-ready future, having a governed, consistent data foundation paired with a strong analytics framework puts you in the right position to take advantage of what’s next.

The bottom line

You don’t have to choose between a powerful data foundation and insights everyone can use. The strongest districts build both: 1) a foundation their technical teams can shape, and 2) dashboards that put trusted data into the hands of every educator. That’s how data stops being something you have and starts being something you use.