Last year, a mid-size district in the Texas Panhandle switched analytics vendors. They'd spent two years building dashboards, configuring reports, and training coordinators on the old system. When they tried to migrate, they discovered that three years of historical data — attendance trends, assessment score histories, intervention tracking records — was stored in a proprietary format that couldn't be exported in any standard structure. Their options: pay the old vendor to maintain read-only access indefinitely, or spend four months rebuilding the data pipeline from scratch using raw SIS exports.
This isn't an edge case. It's the norm. And it's the reason we made data standards a foundational decision at Arcline, not an afterthought.
What Ed-Fi Actually Is
The Ed-Fi Data Standard is an open, community-managed specification for K-12 education data. Maintained by the Ed-Fi Alliance, it defines how student demographics, enrollment, attendance, staff records, assessment results, and operational data should be structured. The goal is straightforward: when two systems both speak Ed-Fi, they can exchange data without building a custom integration for every pair of tools a district uses. Think of it less as a product and more as a shared vocabulary — one that over 4,500 school districts and 16 state education agencies have adopted in some form.
Why We Built on Ed-Fi from Day One
We didn't adopt Ed-Fi because it was trendy. We adopted it because the alternative — building another proprietary data model — would have been a disservice to every district that trusts us with their data.
Portability: Districts Own Their Data
When your analytics platform stores data in Ed-Fi format, you can leave. That sounds like a strange selling point, but it matters. If Arcline ever stops being the right fit, a district can export their complete data set in a structure that any other Ed-Fi-compatible system can ingest. No proprietary lock-in, no hostage negotiation over your own records. Superintendent turnover, budget shifts, changing state requirements — these things happen. Your data shouldn't become inaccessible because of them.
Interoperability: Fewer Integrations, Less Maintenance
Most districts run between 8 and 15 different data systems: SIS, LMS, assessment platforms, special education case management, transportation, HR. Every custom integration between these systems is a maintenance liability. When both sides of an integration use Ed-Fi, the connection is standardized. Connecting to state reporting systems like the Texas Education Exchange — which uses Ed-Fi as its data transport layer — becomes a configuration step rather than a development project. We've seen districts reduce integration timelines from 6-8 weeks to under 10 days when both systems are Ed-Fi-aligned.
Future-Proofing: The Network Effect Is Real
Every year, more SIS vendors, assessment providers, and state agencies adopt Ed-Fi. The more systems in a district's stack that speak Ed-Fi, the less custom work is required to connect them. By building on Ed-Fi now, we ensure that Arcline becomes easier to integrate over time, not harder. This is particularly relevant in states like Texas, where the Texas Education Agency has made Ed-Fi the backbone of its data infrastructure through the Texas Education Exchange.
The Texas Education Exchange: A Concrete Example
The Texas Education Exchange (TXEx) is a statewide initiative that uses Ed-Fi to connect school districts, education service centers, and state agencies through a shared data infrastructure. Instead of every district filing data separately in different formats, TXEx provides a single standards-based pathway for state reporting, data sharing, and compliance.
Because Arcline's data model is Ed-Fi-native, districts using our platform can connect to TXEx without additional data transformation. The attendance data Arcline stores is already in the format TXEx expects. The student demographics are already structured correctly. This isn't a special feature we built for Texas — it's a natural consequence of using an open standard.
What to Ask Your Analytics Vendor
Whether you're evaluating Arcline or another platform, these five questions will tell you a lot about how a vendor thinks about your data:
- Is your data model based on an open standard, or is it proprietary? If the answer is proprietary, ask why. There are sometimes legitimate technical reasons, but you deserve a clear explanation.
- Can I export all my data in a standard format if I switch providers? "We offer CSV exports" is not the same as "We export in Ed-Fi format." A CSV of proprietary field names still requires significant work to make usable elsewhere.
- How do you handle state reporting requirements — Ed-Fi, CEDS, or otherwise? If they can't name the specific standard their state uses, that's a red flag.
- What does integration with my SIS actually look like — custom API work, or standards-based? Custom API integrations work, but they're expensive to maintain and break when either side updates. Ask how many SIS platforms they've connected to and how long it typically takes.
- Do you support the Ed-Fi Operational Data Store (ODS)? The Ed-Fi ODS is the reference implementation for storing Ed-Fi data. Supporting it means a vendor is working within the standard, not just claiming compatibility.
Standards Aren't Exciting. That's the Point.
Nobody evaluates an analytics platform because of its data model. Districts care about whether they can answer questions about student outcomes, staffing, and compliance quickly. That's the right priority.
But underneath every dashboard, every report, every query is a data structure. And the choice between a proprietary structure and an open standard has consequences that show up two or three years down the road — when a new superintendent wants a different tool, when the state changes its reporting requirements, or when a district merges and needs to combine data from two different systems.
Data standards aren't the exciting part of what we build. But they're the difference between a platform that locks you in and one that works with the infrastructure your state is already building. We think that difference matters.
