Illuminations and Insights

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.

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.

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.

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.

Enable Data Union (EDU) is our open framework for analytics and data warehousing based on the Ed-Fi data standard. We are excited to be publicly releasing code and documentation for EDU at www.enabledataunion.org. In this article, we explain our reasoning for choosing to release this code under the PolyForm Noncommercial License. This license allows for noncommercial use, including any use by education agencies, non-profit organizations, and government agencies.

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.