States
Let’s unlock powerful insights for your state’s teachers and learners. For State Education Agencies, Ed-Fi is the key to data connectivity, quality, security, and streamlined reporting.
“There were so many enhancements and processes we could achieve because of the standardization that we brought in in partnership with Ed-Fi. It used to take several days to do a day’s worth of data processing, which we can currently achieve in less than four hours every single day.”
-Satish Pattisapu, CIO, Arizona Department of Education
Set Your Goal
What is the main challenge your agency faces today? What about your IT team? And your school districts? Chances are, you’d be far better equipped to solve these challenges with timely, standardized, high-quality data at your fingertips. State Education Agencies can solve myriad challenges by standardizing student data and connecting data systems.
Right now, your peers nationwide are using Ed-Fi to tackle high-impact issue areas, including:
- Simplifying state and federal reporting
- Streamlining datasets coming from school districts
- Increasing data quality and accuracy
- Creating a culture of data
- Developing Early Warning Systems
The beauty of Ed-Fi for states is that it can help you make all of these improvements (and more). The Ed-Fi Data Standard, Operational Data Store (ODS), and supporting APIs can help you untangle and connect your data across disparate domains, reducing the burden and cost of manual data collection. When you’re running on Ed-Fi, responding to districts’ data requests is far easier. And your data is far more valuable, allowing you to make real-time decisions that will impact your state’s teachers and learners.
It’s best to start by identifying one key challenge you want to solve with Ed-Fi. We call this a “quick win.” Then, you can (and should) continue to build out your implementation.
Get Plugged In
Ed-Fi operates much like an open-source community. Through our community-led governance structure, we solicit honest feedback from the field that informs our technical and strategic direction. This collaborative approach is so successful because of the Ed-Fi Community, a nationwide group of highly engaged education technology leaders like you.
You can join the Ed-Fi Community through our events and webinars, e-newsletters, workgroups, the TechDocs portal, and our Slack channels. The best part of the Ed-Fi Community? Everyone is willing to offer helpful guidance and lessons learned from their own implementation journeys.
While members of your tech team are the ones who will benefit most from creating an Ed-Fi Community Account— which grants access to our technical training, strategic roadmaps, and other resources—we also produce events and content for educators, administrators, and business leaders. We believe the whole sector should be conversing about student data and advocating for interoperability.
Not the right person to be digging into the technical details? Share this page with the person who is! Or share more information about Ed-Fi by downloading our one-pager for SEAs.
Follow the State Education Agency Playbook
When you’re ready to start planning your Ed-Fi implementation, which includes defining your team and data governance framework, you’ll want to get familiar with our primary training resource for State Education Agencies: the Implementation Playbook. This is a step-by-step guide that will walk you through the phases of adopting and implementing Ed-Fi, including:
- Why Adopt the Ed-Fi Data Standard
- Elements of an Ed-Fi Architecture
- Ed-Fi Installation Environments
- Hardware and Software Recommendations
- Developing State Data Specifications
This playbook provides an overview of our technology, tips to define your unique Ed-Fi use case, the most effective approaches when working with Ed-Fi, how to tackle Ed-Fi with your technology providers, and more.
Note: An Ed-Fi Community Account is required to view this guide. Once you’re logged in and reviewing the playbook, you’ll see that there’s a lot to consider when building your interoperability strategy. Fear not! There are hundreds of school districts, charters, and collaboratives that have successfully operationalized Ed-Fi and you can too.
Continue to Build
It’s best to think of interoperability as a journey. You can achieve some powerful “quick wins” for your organization in weeks or months—which we advise as a great starting point to demonstrate the value of Ed-Fi. Then, it’s a matter of mapping out improvements that match your available resources. Our team and passionate community are here to provide ideas, guidance, and frameworks to help you succeed.
Ready?
Need more info? Contact us anytime and we’ll connect you with the state education team.
