CURMUDGUCATION: Ed Tech Giant Powerschool Keeps Eating the World

CURMUDGUCATION: Ed Tech Giant Powerschool Keeps Eating the World

Ed Tech Giant Powerschool Keeps Eating the World

If you want to be a tech giant, you can try to grow organically within your company, or you can just look for companies that are already doing what you want to do, and buy them. Some are better than the strategy than others-- Facebook absorbed Instagram well enough, but Google seems to kill everything it touches.

Back in the day, PowerSchool was a simple little program for taking care of classroom clerical work. Of the e-gradebooks I was forced to use in my career, it was the last and the most usable. Not everyone loves it (though I suspect in some cases it's the local district IT department's choice of options that deserves the blame), and while I'm no technophobe, I never stopped using a paper gradebook and copying it into PowerSchool.

Pearson bought it. Then Pearson sold it to a private investment firm, which is not always good news. But on the user end, we didn't notice much difference.

That was about four years ago, and PowerSchool has developed Aspirations. Now they have finalized the purchase of Schoology, a learning management system that boasts a presence in over 60,000 schools. I have no idea if they're any good or not, though their website does boast one of my favorite Ambiguous Endorsements-- "We put Schoology in front of our teachers and their mouths dropped."

This is the ninth acquisition for PowerSchool since 2015. The goal is a "Unified Classroom" suite, and as described in EdSurge, it's not good news. The goal is "toconnect assessment, enrollment, CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: Ed Tech Giant Powerschool Keeps Eating the World