Illuminate Education, Inc.

Illuminate Education Inc. was formed by Achieve! Data Solutions (ADS) founders (and creators of DataDirector) Lane Rankin, Chris Walker, and Mark Walls to provide the next generation of web-based software and services to the K-12 market. Illuminate Education ?reacquired? two key products from the DataDirector Suite after initially selling them to Houghton-Mifflin Harcourt: Illuminate Student Information System (formerly Iris) and Illuminate Special Education System (formerly Focus). The team that introduced market-leading DataDirector is now proud to introduce the next generation Student Information System, Special Education System, and Data and Assessment Management System. Illuminate Education is not only picking up where ADS left off, but is also taking a big step forward by creating a single centralized solution for data and information management to support all aspects of the education process.

Ten years ago, a group of California educators, technologists, and software engineers founded ADS with the vision of creating groundbreaking education software products to support district and site administrators, teachers, students, and parents in using and understanding critical data. Having been teachers, county and district administrators, and university instructors themselves, the team understood how the fragmentation and segmentation of data was making it difficult for other educators to make critical decisions accurately and efficiently. In response, ADS created DataDirector, the data management and assessment system that put the power of data into the hands of users in a completely web-based and easy-to-use system.

Illuminate Education has gained experience in the educational software industry by providing web-based database driven solutions to the K-12 and higher education markets. When ADS was sold (including DataDirector, Illuminate Special Education, and Illuminate Student Information System) to Harcourt in February of 2007, our team worked as Harcourt employees until February 2009. Fortunately, we were able to reacquire our Illuminate Student Information System (formerly Iris) and Illuminate Special Education System (formerly Focus) products in June of 2009 and developed a far more enhanced data and assessment management system: Illuminate Data and Assessment Management System? (DnA).

When running DataDirector, the Illuminate team supported over 400 Districts and maintained a 99% client retention rate. Now that we have formed Illuminate Education, over 100 Districts joined us within our first year of business, and we have continued to grow while maintaining a 100% client retention rate.

Due to the successful sale to Harcourt, our team has gained not only financial resources, but also experience, connections, partnerships, and technology know-how. With these attributes, Illuminate Education achieved the resources necessary to make Illuminate DnA and other products future market leaders. Our business philosophy is to create affordable, easy to use software and build partnerships with districts that last a lifetime.