PowerSchool Completes Acquisition of Schoology, Marking a Major Step Toward Bringing Enhanced Personalized Learning Technology to K-12 Classrooms

FOLSOM, Calif., Nov. 25, 2019 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- PowerSchool, a leading provider of K-12 education technology solutions, announced today the completion of its acquisition of Schoology, a leading K-12 learning management system (LMS). Teachers will now benefit from Schoology's best-in-class LMS joining existing gradebook, assessment, teacher professional learning, and special programs tools as part of PowerSchool's award-winning Unified Classroom™. Bringing these products together will create a solution with unmatched personalized learning capabilities that helps save teachers time and provides them with the information they need to help each student develop along their individual learning path.

"At PowerSchool, we believe it is long overdue to empower teachers with a full suite of modern classroom software designed specifically to give them time back to spend with their students and the data they need to help each child learn at their own pace, in their own way," said PowerSchool CEO Hardeep Gulati. "Now, with Schoology as part of the PowerSchool Unified Classroom, we're able to provide these critically important capabilities to the people who need them the most and we're excited to bring our vision of personalized learning in the classroom a step closer today."    

For many years, personalized learning has been seen as an opportunity in K-12 education with many districts including it as part of their Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) school improvement plans. However, it's been difficult to deliver on this promise without key technologies being connected and available for teachers to easily learn and use. The definition of personalized learning has also remained somewhat vague while being broadly seen as a promising way to help teachers support student growth and reach their potential. With this acquisition, PowerSchool is able to provide technology solutions that have not existed together before and can deliver on this potential in the following key areas:

• Centralize key aspects of learning to get a complete view of every student, giving teachers all of the tools they need in one unified solution
• Embed formative assessments to allow real-time feedback and adaptation of individual learning plans
• Empower teachers with their own professional learning based on students' instructional needs
• Put parents, teachers, and students on the same team with one source of real-time collaboration and communication
• Develop personal learning paths based on specific student needs and information across student information system (SIS), learning, assessment, special education, and teacher professional development enabling them to learn in their own way based on their learning styles

Schoology's learning management system will continue to function as a distinct product within the PowerSchool Unified Classroom and will receive additional investments including a 40 percent increase in development resources to deliver the current roadmap and new innovations. This is in addition to PowerSchool's current annual investment of $90 million per year in software research and development, product enhancements, and innovation.

"We are extremely excited about PowerSchool and Schoology coming together to leverage both of their industry-leading solutions that together are making the vision of personalized learning come to life," said Sharon Thierfelder, Assistant Director of Information Services, Aurora West School District 129 in Illinois. "We chose products from each company because they were best in class, and combined, the possibilities are going to further advance what we can do to best support our educators and students."

PowerSchool also announced today plans for simplified workflows between Schoology and PowerSchool's existing core solutions. The company will also continue to support the broader education technology ecosystem through open standards-based and out-of-the-box integrations with all SIS platforms, Google, Microsoft, and other third-party education tools, as well as providing more robust benchmark and summative assessment with PowerSchool Performance Matters, special education, and gradebook tools. PowerSchool is also committed to supporting industry-leading open standards, such as OneRoster and LTI from the IMS Global Learning Consortium and Ed-Fi.

"Our customers have been telling us they are excited about our roadmap and have been asking us to deliver a more unified solution with additional capabilities. We are excited to provide that to them on a much greater scale with the investment we get by being part of PowerSchool, and some of the additional capabilities that our customers wanted will become a reality," said Schoology CEO and Co-Founder, Jeremy Friedman.

About PowerSchool Group LLC

At PowerSchool, we believe in the simple truth that every student deserves the best opportunities in life. That's why our mission is to power the education ecosystem with unified technology that helps educators and students realize their potential, in their way. From the front office to the classroom to the home, PowerSchool helps schools and districts efficiently manage instruction, learning, grading, attendance, assessment, analytics, state reporting, special education, student registration, talent, finance, and HR. Today, we're proud to be the leading provider of K-12 education application technology supporting over 45 million students in over 80 countries. Visit http://www.powerschool.com to learn more.

SOURCE PowerSchool