Illuminations and Insights

Much like working with Lego blocks, building modern data infrastructure in education requires not just having a vision or set of goals, but also organizing the component pieces in ways aligned to those goals. In this blog, we describe lessons learned from working with districts and states to implement Ed-Fi and discuss how our StartingBlocks product is helping education agencies realize a grounded approach to modernizing education technology.

20 years of technology development and large-scale implementation of Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems (SLDS) have generated a wealth of knowledge, strategies, and successes, which will be invaluable to the next phase of SLDS work. In this blog, EA's CEO Andrew Rice lays out a vision for a collaborative state strategy for the next generation of SLDS that leverages the idea of a reference software build. The blog summarizes the policy and technological trends that have brought us to the field's current state and proposes a collaborative strategy to realize the promise and potential of the next version of SLDS.

Education Analytics welcomes a new group of interns every summer to support various teams and projects at our organization. Interns receive relevant training, mentoring, and hands-on experience that enables them to find success not only at EA, but also in their professional careers. In this blog, we describe our internship program, discuss the goals for both the interns and the organization, and highlight this cohort’s summer projects.

Enable Data Union (EDU) is open software for an Ed-Fi data warehouse solution and a community we are developing to share ideas, experiences, and code among education agencies. Stadium is a hosted version of this product provided by Education Analytics. In this blog, we highlight why this solution is needed, describe our philosophy around its development, and provide details on the EDU and Stadium products.

Education Analytics, a mission-driven non-profit that uses data and analytics to improve outcomes for students and the education system, announced today that they have earned another badge from the Ed-Fi Alliance for a new data warehouse product, Stadium. Stadium is a hosted implementation of EA’s Ed-Fi data warehouse product, Enable Data Union (EDU), which enables education agencies to leverage interoperable data for analytical uses.

How do we help foster teacher innovation? In this blog, we highlight how an exciting new software application paired with a model for teacher action research enables teachers to identify evidence-based instructional strategies, test them out in their classroom, and use data to determine if they really make a difference in student achievement.