The University of Dayton will help lead a $1.4 million grant project from the Gates Foundation to build smart AI tools for public schools that cut through paperwork and help educators make better decisions for students.
"Leading school improvement efforts is challenging work, and too often, school leaders get bogged down in paperwork or lose momentum when key staff leave," said Meredith Wronowski, UD associate professor of educational administration. "This technology holds promise to clear those obstacles so educators can keep their focus on supporting students.”
Many schools develop an annual school improvement plan to outline their academic goals, student support strategies and resource priorities. To help state departments of education review these plans for quality and regulatory compliance, Wronowski and Bryan VanGronigen at the University of Delaware are collaborating with IT firm Toboggan Labs to expand an AI tool originally developed under a Gates Foundation investment during the 2025-26 school year.
“Because many state departments of education are thinly staffed and providing feedback on plans is a time-consuming process, meaningful feedback to schools can often be delayed or never happen in the first place,” Wronowski said.
This AI tool developed as part of this grant helps speed up and improve the quality of that review by evaluating the improvement plans and automatically generating feedback for state officials to build from, freeing them up to spend less time checking boxes and more time actively coaching district and school leaders through improvement efforts.
Working with University of Dayton computer science professors Michael Poor and Nick Stiffler, the team also received seed funding to build a concept of a second, related AI tool that works like a digital memory for a school. This tool is intended to help educators develop higher-quality plans from the outset instead of waiting to receive feedback from state officials, which can come too late into a school year and when student support strategies have already started to be implemented.
“School improvement efforts require critical information about student learning, lessons and past decisions, which is hard to bring together and often disappears when educators and leaders leave,” Wronowski said. “This digital memory planning tool seeks to store that history so new leaders can make smarter, more informed, and more efficient decisions. Based on where their specific school has been over the last few years, this tool does a lot of that initial work so leaders don’t need to invest considerable effort up front just getting up to speed.”
The grant also supports research opportunities for graduate and undergraduate students at both universities.