School districts spend billions on educational technology every year, yet too often those investments sit unused or fail to move the needle for students. With every dollar and every instructional minute under scrutiny, the pressure to prove real return, on investment and on instruction, has never been greater. In this session, our panelists explore what it truly takes to build contracts and partnerships where evidence drives decisions and student outcomes remain the bottom line.

Discover the latest additions to the ClassLink security portfolio, all built on one principle: least privilege, everywhere. See how DataGuard masks PII while still letting teachers view the reporting data they need, and how our new Privileged Access Management (PAM) system lets you request, approve, grant, extend, and revoke time-bound admin access across directory platforms, automatically and with a full audit trail. We'll also preview other new security features coming your way.

We've gotten comfortable telling stories about our data. Scores went up, so it must be the new program. A tool is popular, so it must be working. But a good story isn't the same as evidence, and confident explanations are easy to build. Using the story of four astronomers who reshaped how we see the universe, this session offers a discipline for education data: separate what you believe from what you can actually show.

This session moves from the panel’s discussion of evidence in education into a practical look at outcomes based contracting, a model that ties provider payment directly to measurable student outcomes. Drawing on real district and provider partnerships, Jasmine Walker will walk through how outcomes based contracting works in practice, the conditions that make it successful, and what education leaders should consider before adopting it. Attendees will leave with a clear framework for connecting evidence to accountability and results.

Assessment scores live in one system, attendance in another, and rosters somewhere else entirely. Before anyone can use data, someone has to clean it up first. This session follows that journey from messy to meaningful, featuring perspectives from the team behind the data standard that makes clean exchange possible, a district that lived the data drama firsthand, and a learning platform on the receiving end. Together, they trace the full path from source to action.

Not all screen time is equal, and Greenville Schools wanted to know the difference. Most districts have little visibility into whether students are focused, learning, or simply logged on. Digital health isn't just about how much time students spend on devices; it's about the quality of that time. In this session, go inside Greenville Schools' rollout of ClassLink Analytics+ Screen Time, from what prompted them to look, to what they're learning from their first real look at the data.