What is Polaris Education?
Who we are, why we built Polaris, and how to partner with us.
What's an empathy interview?
An empathy interview is a structured conversation with a person or small group where the goal is simply to understand their experience. You're not evaluating or teaching, just listening. The conversation is usually small-group or one-on-one, the questions are open-ended, and recording it lets the facilitator stay present in the room instead of scribbling notes.
The point is to hear what students think about school in their own words, including the context that shaped their answer. Once you have a body of these conversations across a building or a grade level, you start to see patterns: what students consistently bring up, and where their experience diverges from what adults assume.
Why we built Polaris
Schools have access to more data than ever (test scores, attendance, climate-survey numbers), and almost none of it comes directly from students themselves. Big numbers tell you what's happening at a high level, but they don't tell you what it feels like to be in your school. The most useful data for understanding a school is qualitative, and it comes from listening to the people who live it.
The usual options for that kind of listening are either expensive (hire researchers to come run focus groups) or thin (an annual climate survey and call it listening). Polaris is built to make the deeper kind, empathy interviews, possible without a research budget or a year of lag time.
Polaris is built by Human Restoration Project, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that's been working with schools on systemic change since 2020. HRP's focus is the research and practices that make schools more human: Universal Design for Learning, project-based learning, restorative practices, youth-centered design. Polaris is the software side of that work. Because we're a nonprofit, the goal is sustainability rather than growth at all costs. Our board oversees the platform, and a steering committee of educators, researchers, students, and family members meets quarterly to keep us honest about who Polaris is for.
How we work with schools
A typical partnership looks like this: we co-create a question set with your team, your staff runs a few listening sessions across a building or grade level, the recordings come back to us, and a few business days later the report lands in your inbox. Most districts on Polaris run four sessions a year, enough to see how themes shift over time without overloading anyone's plate.
We can also come in for the human pieces around the platform: host training so your staff feel confident running interviews, participant co-analysis sessions where participants interpret what came out of their conversations, or data workshops where students prepare presentations for staff, boards, and policymakers. All of these are optional.
How the AI fits in
Polaris is not an AI chatbot for students, and we want to be loud about that. Participants don't talk to a language model; they talk to each other. The AI we use sits on our side of the wall, helping our team make sense of what people actually said. We've written into our bylaws that we won't sell student data or share it with third parties, ever. The only exception is mandated reporting: if a conversation surfaces something urgent, it goes straight to a trusted adult at your school.
In practice, every claim in a Polaris report ties back to specific quotes you can play back as audio. We don't smooth out how people said something: native language, slang, and the texture of the moment stay in. Because AI tools can pick up the biases of whatever they were trained on, Polaris only draws on peer-reviewed education research. Our team tests against problematic outputs on a regular basis. And before any report goes out, a human on our team reads through what the system produced. Nothing reaches a school or organization until a person has signed off.
For the long version (mission, system architecture, the research literature on big data vs. thick data, and the theory of action behind all of this), read the Polaris guiding document. It has the citations.
If you're considering working with us, the easiest first step is the contact form. We'll set up a conversation about your school and what you're trying to listen for.