Illuminations and Insights

Get to know Senior Research Analyst Kayla Bollinger in the latest installment of our Day in the Life blog series. In the blog, Kayla discusses her expertise in building scalable analytics for the districts EA partners with, her contributions to growth work in South Carolina, and the aspects of her role that she finds the most rewarding.

EA's data visualization tool, Rally Analytics Platform, developed in collaboration with the South Carolina Department of Education and CORE Districts, provides actionable academic and well-being data for teachers and administrators to better understand and support students. This year, districts across South Carolina, where Rally is known as "Teacher Navigator," began using new Groups & Interventions feature, giving administrators and staff a streamlined way to organize, track, and strengthen their supplemental student support programs. In this blog, Director of Software Solutions Ben Dederich emphasizes the benefits of this new feature through highlighting Laurens County School District 55 in South Carolina, where intervention staff and administrators in the district can manage their groups directly in Rally—saving time and improving accuracy.

Get to know Monica Bhatt, Education Analytics (EA) Board Member and Senior Research Director at the University of Chicago Crime Lab and Education Lab, in the latest blog on our website. In conversation with EA CEO Andrew Rice, Monica discusses the day-to-day responsibilities of her role, what drew her to serve on EA's Board of Directors, how she thinks the education research field will evolve in the coming years, and the challenges that are still ahead for the field.

K-12 has lived through many “next big things” in edtech. Some have delivered real value, especially in large-scale data collection and adaptive learning. But across states and districts, student outcome progress and gaps remain stubborn, and leaders are rightly skeptical that a new wave of AI tools alone will change that. This is not simply a failure of technology. It reflects a basic fact: no algorithm can solve challenges rooted in resource inequities or social conditions. What AI can do is help educators, policymakers, and researchers reason more clearly with the information they already have. That only works if the data are accurate, standardized, and connected, and if the people closest to students remain in charge of how those data are used. In this blog, Vice President of Data Science Dan Jarratt discusses how, in order to ensure that AI systems that are effective, auditable, and equitable for students, we must start with something more basic: open, interoperable, standardized data infrastructure that public agencies can govern and sustain.

Get to know Technical Product Manager Katie O'Brien in the latest installment of our Day in the Life blog series. In the blog, Katie discusses her journey from intern to full-time staff member at EA, her involvement in product development for our data visualization tool, Podium, and how she thinks technology advancements will bring about new changes and insights to the EdTech space in the coming year.

Efforts to modernize organizational operations often center on a familiar triad: people, process, and technology. More recently, data has become a fourth, indispensable dimension, woven into every aspect of how organizations operate. At Education Analytics (EA), we've seen firsthand how beginning modernization with any single dimension — and addressing the others in a linear sequence — creates a Gordian knot. Each attempt to optimize one strand tightens the others, stalling progress and increasing friction. In our latest blog, CEO Andrew Rice and COO Libby Pier share EA’s approach to a parallel, people-centered model of governance--one that treats data, software, and process as interconnected and equal pillars of modernization. They introduce the prism model, a framework that can help districts and states accelerate their digital transformation efforts--and that has helped us begin to untangle our own Gordian knot as an organization. By managing these dimensions together through creativity, collaboration, and conflict resolution, people drive meaningful and lasting progress.