Today, we're announcing that Arcline has joined the Ed-Fi Alliance as an official member. For districts that work with us — and for districts evaluating us — this is one of the most important commitments we've made about how we build.
Here's what it means and why it matters.
What the Ed-Fi Alliance Is
The Ed-Fi Alliance is a nonprofit community that maintains the Ed-Fi Data Standard — the most widely adopted open data standard in K-12 education. Over 4,500 school districts and 16 state education agencies currently use Ed-Fi to structure how student, staff, assessment, and operational data moves between systems.
In practical terms, the Ed-Fi Data Standard defines a common language for education data. It specifies what a student enrollment record should look like, what fields an assessment result should contain, how staff assignments should be structured, and how all of these data types relate to each other. When two systems both speak Ed-Fi, they can exchange information without someone building a custom integration for every vendor pair.
This matters because the average school district uses between 30 and 90 different software applications. Without a shared standard, every connection between two systems requires its own translation layer — its own mapping of field names, its own handling of data formats, its own maintenance burden when either system updates. Ed-Fi reduces that burden by giving everyone a common schema to build against.
What Membership Means for Arcline
Joining the Ed-Fi Alliance involves three specific commitments:
- Certification against the Ed-Fi standard. Arcline's data ingestion and export capabilities will be certified to comply with the Ed-Fi Data Standard. This means that data flowing into and out of Arcline follows the same structure that 4,500+ districts already use. We're beginning the certification process now and expect to complete it by the end of 2025.
- Participation in technical working groups. The Ed-Fi Alliance runs working groups where member organizations collaborate on extending and improving the standard — things like how to represent chronic absenteeism indicators, how to handle mid-year transfers, and how to structure assessment data when different states use different scoring frameworks. We'll have a seat at those tables, contributing to decisions that affect interoperability across the entire K-12 data ecosystem.
- A commitment to open standards over proprietary formats. This is the one that matters most. Membership is a public statement that Arcline will build on open, shared standards rather than inventing proprietary data formats that lock districts into our platform.
Why This Matters for Districts: Data Portability
The single most important implication of Ed-Fi certification is data portability. If your district uses Arcline and later decides to switch to a different platform — for any reason — your data comes with you. It exports in a standard format that any other Ed-Fi-certified system can read. No proprietary export headaches. No vendor lock-in. No six-month data migration project where half your historical records get lost in translation.
This might sound like an unusual thing for a vendor to highlight. Most companies want to make it hard to leave. We think that's exactly the wrong approach, especially in public education. Districts are stewards of student data on behalf of families and communities. That data doesn't belong to us. It doesn't belong to any vendor. It belongs to the district, and the district should be able to move it wherever they need to, whenever they need to, without asking permission or paying an exit fee.
Data portability also protects districts from a risk that doesn't get discussed enough: vendor failure. Startups shut down. Companies get acquired and discontinue products. If your data is trapped in a proprietary format when that happens, the migration can cost months of staff time and hundreds of thousands of dollars. If your data is in Ed-Fi format, the transition is a fraction of that effort.
The Broader Trend: States Are Building on Ed-Fi
Our decision to join the Ed-Fi Alliance isn't happening in isolation. A growing number of states are building their data infrastructure on Ed-Fi, which means Ed-Fi compliance is becoming less of a nice-to-have and more of a requirement for vendors that want to work in those states.
Texas launched the Texas Education Exchange (TEE), a statewide data infrastructure built on the Ed-Fi standard that enables districts to share data securely with the Texas Education Agency and with each other. Wisconsin's Department of Public Instruction has adopted Ed-Fi as its standard for longitudinal data collection from districts. Nebraska is rolling out Ed-Fi-based data collection to replace its legacy state reporting system. Several other states are in various stages of planning or piloting Ed-Fi adoption.
For districts in these states, using Ed-Fi-certified vendors isn't just about convenience — it's about compliance with state data collection requirements. And for districts in states that haven't adopted Ed-Fi yet, choosing certified vendors now is a way to future-proof their data strategy. When — not if — their state moves toward a standard, they'll already be ready.
Why We Made This Decision
"We looked at the trajectory of K-12 data infrastructure and saw one clear direction: open standards are winning. Not because anyone is mandating them from the top down, but because districts are tired of paying the cost of proprietary data silos. When your SIS can't talk to your assessment platform because they use different data formats, the person who pays for that is a data coordinator working until midnight. Ed-Fi fixes that, and we want to be part of that fix — not an exception to it."
— James Crawford, Head of Partnerships
We've already been building with Ed-Fi compatibility in mind — several of our district partners use Ed-Fi Operational Data Stores, and our integration layer supports Ed-Fi data models. Formal membership and certification make that commitment official and verifiable.
Open Is the Future
We believe the future of K-12 data is open. Open standards. Open data formats. Open interoperability between systems. Not because "open" is a good marketing word, but because the alternative — a landscape of proprietary formats where every vendor connection requires custom work — is what created the data silos that districts are struggling with today.
Joining the Ed-Fi Alliance is our commitment to building on that open future, not against it. For the districts we serve, it means your data stays yours — structured, portable, and ready to move wherever you need it, whenever you need it.
If you have questions about what Ed-Fi certification means for your district's data or how Arcline's Ed-Fi integration works in practice, reach out to us at partnerships@arcline.io. We're happy to walk through the specifics.
