By the time chronic absenteeism presents itself and on-time graduation is at risk, schools and districts have missed critical early warnings that lie buried in often noisy student data. Meanwhile, the educators who might have caught these warnings earlier are overwhelmed: About 50% of teachers cite administrative tasks, like manually transferring student data, as their top source of job stress, driving more than three-quarters of teachers to consider quitting their profession. The onus of administrative tasks is a systems problem: The tension between the urgent need for actionable data and the crushing burden of acting on it lies in the ineffective, outmoded, and needlessly complex data systems that schools and districts often employ. To identify early warning signs, teams need an efficient system that delivers holistic student context at the right time, driving interventions and ensuring students’ continued success.
The technical systems that support student success are too often an ad-hoc compilation of tools pieced together with digital tape and glue. Driven by immediate need instead of systemwide vision, districts and schools select individual tools for isolated tasks. In practice, this means a single platform takes attendance, another pushes family notifications, a third stores counselors’ notes, and a fourth tracks intervention implementation and impact, among an ecosystem of many other tools. This fragmented approach creates an overwhelming strain on school and district staff, directly contributing to systemic burnout, and prevents them from seeing a holistic picture of what supports are needed. But the real cost is felt by students. The result: School staff are unable to access the data they need to identify at-risk students, while students are unable to access the support they need to succeed.
High-quality design of student success systems addresses these multifaceted challenges. These systems are human-centered, evidence-based frameworks that unite school and district staff in supporting each student in graduating on time, prepared to flourish in their next steps (The GRAD Partnership). The most powerful systems seamlessly integrate technical capabilities across multiple technology solutions, layering in multi-tiered systems of support (MTSS), to drive actionable data cycles. Rather than replacing human judgment, a well-configured system:
Mutual understanding between students, school and district staff, and families is the heart of this work. Yet, without intentionally designed systems, they are forced to use limited, outdated, and fragmented data and therefore rely on guesswork to pinpoint root causes. A well-designed student success system establishes the seamless flow of information so staff, students, and families can build mutual understanding to provide students the correct help exactly when they need it.
In collaboration with the GRAD Partnership, CORE Districts, Network for College Success (NCS), and Preva Group, and in partnership with technical solution providers and district and school teams, Digital Promise developed the Student Success Systems Playbook. The playbook is designed to support schools and districts with creating their own student success system, provide critical directions on how to deploy their system effectively, and share recommendations for how staff might be able to leverage AI to increase capacity.
This calendar-based, interactive, online tool centers human expertise and relationships while optimizing the underlying technology. The playbook explicitly maps out the critical roles of staff, students, and families throughout the key milestones across a school year and how technology can support those roles. By identifying technical capabilities that can offload routine and administrative burdens, the playbook frees up what teams need most: time to collaborate and build relationships with students and caregivers.
The playbook organizes workflows—or plays—across three distinct stages of the academic year:
| Topic | Plays |
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Roster Students |
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Set Up Gradebooks |
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Prepare Reports |
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| Topic |
Roster Students |
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Set Up Gradebooks |
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Prepare Reports |
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Identify At-Risk Students |
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Center Students and Families in Decisions |
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Assign Interventions |
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Monitor Interventions |
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| Topic |
Identify At-Risk Students |
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Center Students and Families in Decisions |
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Assign Interventions |
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Monitor Interventions |
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Plan for Continuous Improvement |
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Wrap Up Data Processes |
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Plan for Continuous Improvement |
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Wrap Up Data Processes |
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The Student Success Playbook is an interactive, tool-agnostic resource designed to help school and district teams maximize and optimize technology they already have in place, rather than forcing them to adopt new applications. Whether used independently by a school or district team or in tandem with technical assistance providers, the playbook supports teams in designing comprehensive student profiles, mapping out data collection timelines over the school year, and establishing intervention assignment, monitoring, and evaluation protocols to offer the support each student needs to thrive.
The playbook delivers a robust set of interactive resources for each topic:
The playbook is designed to meet teams exactly where they are, allowing them to jump into urgent priorities immediately while maintaining a comprehensive blueprint for year-long systemic health. By intentionally shaping the district’s technical pipelines, the playbook ensures that data flows smoothly across every touchpoint, transforming technology from an administrative barrier into a catalyst for student success.
Want to know more about efforts to improve on-track graduation with emerging technologies?
