Illuminations and Insights

At EA, we strive to build standard data infrastructure that democratizes data access, so educators can gain insights and improve student outcomes. In the age of AI, we are expanding that goal to cover not just data infrastructure, but “AI infrastructure” as well. That means building a system for AI-friendly context and deploying tools that utilize LLMs to answer prompts, so educators or agency staff who otherwise don’t have the time or technical expertise can access the data insights they need. We have built Stadium AI to test the hypothesis that a natural language interface on top of a well-structured education data warehouse could let more people, not just analysts, ask questions about their data and get answers they can trust. We started with testing a beta version of Stadium AI with real analyst users at the South Carolina Department of Education (SCDE) to see how they would use it, and if that could inform how a broader audience may use the tool. What we didn't expect? What users would ask when given the tool. In this blog, Technical Lead Manager Rob Little and Senior Product Manager Molly Stewart share what we've learned throughout the process of building Stadium AI.

Enable Data Union (EDU) is now compatible with Databricks. EDU was built on the principle that shared data infrastructure for public education should be open, standards-based, and never locked to a single vendor. When the Tennessee Department of Education told us their environment ran on Microsoft and Databricks — and switching wasn't an option — we saw an opportunity to prove that open, vendor-neutral infrastructure was possible. Thanks to a close collaboration with Tennessee's team, including direct code contributions, EDU now runs on Databricks. One state's contribution becomes a starting point for every agency that comes after them. Technical Lead Manager Rob Little shares the full story in this blog.

Every fall, the Ed-Fi Alliance hosts its annual Ed-Fi Summit conference to bring together state and local education leaders, EdTech providers, educators, and technical experts who are turning data into real solutions for students. Several EA staff attended Ed-Fi Summit 2025 and left the conference energized by the dedication, expertise, and passions of people within the Ed-Fi community that they learned from, presented to, and chatted with at Ed-Fi Summit. In this blog, EA staff share some of their key reflections after attending, presenting, and collaborating at Ed-Fi Summit 2025.

Every year the Ed-Fi Alliance hosts its Technical Congress to bring together members from across the EdTech community, including data scientists, chief architects, IT application developers, software engineers, educational technology developers, and more. The goal of the Ed-Fi Alliance’s Tech Congress is to host a discussion-based forum with the community to help the Ed-Fi Data Standard and technology suite grow more usable, practical, and sophisticated to reach our shared goal of making a positive impact to assist student and classroom outcomes. Staff from across Education Analytics (EA) attended the two-day event and connected with school districts, EdTech leaders, and current and potential partner organizations. In this blog, EA staff share their key takeaways from this year's Ed-Fi Tech Congress.

Sometimes our partners cannot access student-level data. In this blog, we detail how EA maintains a robust data system of publicly available data and how we create custom reporting to provide data-driven insights for our partners.