Illuminations and Insights

Get to know Senior Data Engineer Angelica Lastra in the latest installment of our Day in the Life series. In the blog, Angelica describes her journey from designer to engineer, the joy she finds in fixing broken code or untangling data pipeline, and the wisdom she would impart on her younger self about her career.

Across districts and states, education leaders are asking more specific, more urgent questions about their data. EA’s data visualization product, Podium, helps to answer common questions about topics such as chronic absenteeism, enrollment trends, behavior patterns, and performance. But many of our partners also need additional dashboards tailored to their local context, priorities, and strategies. Podium+, our self-service dashboarding add-on, empowers partners to build custom dashboards using Podium’s platform and tools. Sharing those dashboards broadly with the educators and leaders who need them most hasn't been easy — until now. In this blog, we’re introducing Embed Studio, a new Podium+ feature that enables partners to publish the dashboards they build directly into the Podium application alongside the EA-managed dashboards.

CEO Andrew Rice explores the growing role of AI-powered tutors and learning agents—and the powerful, deeply personal data they are beginning to capture. These systems don’t just track performance; they build a longitudinal model of how a student thinks, learns, and engages. Right now, much of that “learning context” lives on corporate servers. In the blog, Andrew proposes a different path: a custodian model, where student learning data is held in trust by institutions, but owned by students and their families—portable, auditable, and protected.

Get to know our Director of Internal Data & Analytics, Annie Nielsen, in the latest installment of our “Day in the Life” series. In the blog, Annie shares insights into her role leading the development and maintenance of EA’s internal data model and analytic infrastructure, her journey from the Analyst team to the Business Operations team, and her passion for streamlining systems to make work easier for her colleagues.

In this blog, CEO Andrew Rice reflects on the new vision document from the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), Reimagining the Institute of Education Sciences. In the blog, Andrew shares how strongly the vision resonates with the work EA's been building toward for years—especially the call to move education data from a static snapshot to a continuous stream. Real modernization requires shared, durable software. It requires governance, engineering capacity, and cross-state collaboration through models like state consortia. It requires equipping researchers with data engineering skills alongside statistical expertise. Andrew reflects on what it will actually take to make the IES vision a reality—and why this moment matters.

Get to know the Director of Finance Eric Cramer in the latest installment of our Day in the Life series. In the blog, Eric describes his start in the education research space as an undergraduate student, the exciting nature of his responsibilities overseeing and analyzing data within EA's financial systems to drive the organization forward, and how he spends his time outside of work exploring state parks with his dogs.