The Ed-Fi Alliance
The Ed-Fi Alliance is a nonprofit organization that helps education organizations and technology providers exchange data through a shared data standard, APIs, and supporting technology.
The Ed-Fi Data Standard
The Ed-Fi Data Standard is a comprehensive, extensible model for representing information used throughout education. It gives participating systems a common way to describe data while allowing implementations to address additional local needs.
Students
Demographics, identifiers, contacts, and related student information.
Enrollment
School, program, section, and course participation across time.
Attendance
Attendance events and measures associated with students and schools.
Assessments
Assessment definitions, administration information, results, and reporting context.
Staff and instruction
Educator assignments, sections, courses, calendars, and instructional relationships.
Local extensions
Additional elements that address implementation needs beyond the core model.
More than a data model
Ed-Fi combines several layers that help organizations put the standard into practice.
Define
The data model establishes shared entities, relationships, and definitions for education information.
Exchange
Application programming interfaces (APIs) and exchange formats such as JSON allow authorized systems to send and receive standardized data.
Implement
Technology, validation processes, documentation, training, and community support help teams build and maintain integrations.
Who uses the Ed-Fi ecosystem
School districts
Connect operational and instructional systems, reduce custom integration work, and make authorized data more useful.
State education agencies
Support standardized collection, integration, and use of data across participating organizations.
Technology providers
Build products that exchange information through documented, reusable standards instead of separate formats for every customer.
Data and research teams
Work with more consistent information for reporting, analysis, and authorized decision support.
The intended value
By reducing avoidable differences in how education data is represented and exchanged, Ed-Fi can help organizations spend less effort reconciling systems and more effort using timely, accurate information to support educators, leaders, and students.
Standards do not replace data governance
A common data standard defines how information can be represented and exchanged; it does not determine who should have access. Implementations still require strong privacy, security, data-quality, role-based access, retention, and governance practices.