Illuminations and Insights
We shine a light on our partners, the work we've done across the country, and insights from our team members.
Introducing Podium, an Ed-Fi enabled set of common dashboards to support school and district decision making
The amount of data generated by schools and school districts continues to grow and it is a challenge to bring together all of those data in a manner that informs timely action. Our latest product, Podium, empowers schools and school districts with actionable data to help better serve students, families, and staff. In this blog, we describe how Podium helps to deliver the right data at the right time.
The mission is our why: The wins and the pains of scaling Future Forward nationwide
By employing a combination of high-dosage tutoring and consistent family engagement using known best practices, Future Forward has emerged and cemented its status as a leading practitioner of literacy instruction for children. In this blog, we discuss Future Forward’s history, scale up, evolution, and vision for what is next in the pursuit to make all children joyful, confident readers.
What does it take to create an equity-focused system of school accountability?
In pursuit of our mission to use data and evidence to help close opportunity gaps for the most vulnerable and historically marginalized students, EA applied for and received a research grant from the K12 Research for Equity Hub to explore how accountability systems can better promote equity in schools and districts. In this blog, we examine the benefits and challenges of bringing together our knowledge of predictive analytics and early warning systems to transform these accountability systems into transformational data systems for school improvement.
From datasets to data streams: How we can move the education field away from being data rich but information poor
At EA, we believe that deep integration of education research and technology has the power to create a new breed of modern, data-centric education organizations capable of achieving breakthrough student outcomes. But this integration requires the field of education research to catch up to the advances of modern technology, and the technology field to apply research-grade thinking to how we build and scale technology. In this blog, we propose that to achieve this integration, we need to replace the concept of a dataset with a data stream, and we examine this challenge from the perspective of education researchers and from technologists.
Levels of data security certification: EA's SOC2 journey
This year, EA went through the process of becoming certified in SOC2, which verifies that Education Analytics securely manages our partners’ data to protect student privacy and ensure confidentiality. In this blog, we describe the importance of SOC2 compliance in our work, summarize the steps we took during the SOC2 auditing process, and highlight what’s next for EA when it comes to embracing data security best practices.
Student assets during COVID-19: The role of social-emotional learning and school climate in students’ academic progress during COVID
We analyzed data from K-12 public schools funded by NewSchools Venture Fund to examine longitudinal changes in students’ social-emotional learning (SEL) and school culture/climate (CC) survey measures, along with academic growth. In this blog, we summarize findings of our exploration of whether SEL and CC served as a protective factor against academic learning lag during COVID-19.