Impact Public Schools wants software to sort students into intervention tiers

Impact Public Schools, a charter network in Washington state, wants a vendor to design, build and deploy software that reads benchmark scores and sorts students into Tier 1, 2 and 3 groups. For students in Tier 2 and 3, the tool also has to recommend interventions.

Michelle Caffrey flagged the request in EdWeek Market Brief's purchasing alerts. It's a teacher planning tool built around the network's weekly "What I Need" intervention block, and a state grant covers part of the cost. Anyone who wants the job has until Oct. 9 to submit a proposal. Questions must be submitted through the network's online question form by Sept. 28.

North Kansas City Schools in Missouri wants a web-based dashboard and analytics platform. Side by side, the two requests suggest a split in the work: one buyer wants its numbers in one place, and the other wants software that acts on them.

Four systems, three audiences, one screen

North Kansas City's request is specific about the plumbing. The platform has to pull data from the district's student information system and from its assessment, attendance and behavior systems, then present it as interactive dashboards for district leaders, school administrators and teachers. Those dashboards should support decisions at four levels: district, school, classroom and student.

The measures are listed too: state accountability measures, student achievement and growth, attendance, graduation, and college- and career-readiness indicators. For a district of about 21,000 students, the list reads like the reporting a central office already owes someone. Vendors send questions through the district's online bidding portal.

Impact's request is much smaller. The network enrolls 1,751 students, and its tool works on one decision that teachers make every week: who goes in which group, and what those groups do. The RFP asks for a design-and-build partner, so the winning firm is writing software for one network's tier structure and benchmark data.

The regrouping step becomes a software requirement

Dashboards have been an official priority for a long time. In January 2016, Malia Herman reported in Education Week that the U.S. Department of Education's National Education Technology Plan, released in December 2015, told states, districts and ed-tech companies that expanding and improving learning dashboards was a high priority. The plan described dashboards that combine assessments, learning tools and educator observations into real-time views of student progress.

Andrew Calkins, then deputy director of EDUCAUSE's Next Generation Learning Challenges, told Herman what the payoff would be. Once the data sat in one place, he argued, teachers could group and regroup students on the fly and build flexible schedules without tracking goals by hand. The dashboard helped. The teacher still did the grouping.

Impact's spec gives the grouping to the software. A decade after the national ed-tech plan put dashboards near the top of the list, a 1,751-student charter network is asking software to do the student grouping itself.

Herman's experts had other advice that shows up in these requests. Julia Freeland Fisher of the Clayton Christensen Institute warned that dashboards get pulled between two jobs, reporting formal assessment results and giving teachers data they can use day to day. Impact's weekly planner is aimed squarely at the second.

The split isn't clean, though. North Kansas City names teachers and classroom-level decisions in its scope, and Impact's tool covers a single weekly block, paid for partly by a grant. What separates the two is emphasis. Neither one replaces the other.

Stamford wants a portrait built from scratch

The third request in the alert is a different kind of purchase. Stamford Public Schools in Connecticut, with about 17,000 students, wants a consultant to lead the development of a districtwide portrait of a graduate. The district says the process should be customized and driven by the community, and it rules out a predetermined or proprietary model.

The consultant's role is to facilitate the process, so this is a facilitation job, not a software purchase.

Free Gemini sets the price for generic AI planning in Missouri

North Kansas City is shopping at a time when Missouri classrooms can get AI at no cost. On Sept. 8, the Missouri Department of Higher Education and Workforce Development and the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education announced a partnership with Google. It gives educators, students and staff free access to Gemini for Education, Gemini Notebook and the Google AI Educator Series training. The agencies noted that Missouri is home to nearly 100,000 active educators and 1.1 million students across all levels of education.

Impact's request points to where a paid build can still make its case. Drafting a lesson plan is a general task. Turning one network's benchmark results into tier groups and picking interventions for the students who need them depends on that network's own data and rules. Proposals are due Oct. 9.