2026 Reports

From Files to Systems: How States Organize Their Public Education Data and Why It Matters

Kandemir, Erva; Phan, Lan H.; Bowers, Alex J.; Saldaña, Christopher; Halverson, Richard

Across states, large amounts of education data are publicly available and open access across a wide range of data files, yet each state organizes and structures its websites and datasets in fundamentally different ways. This makes it difficult for education leaders looking to understand how their schools and districts are performing in relation to their region and the rest of the state in both outcomes and student access to opportunities and resources offered by their schools. States currently lack a clear way to understand and work with these files using a common language that helps bring these hundreds of data files closer to the evidence-based improvement goals of schools and districts. In this brief, we detail a recent project in which we described and cataloged the wide range of public education data available across seven states and Washington, D.C., including 3,822 individual datasets. Importantly, the project provides a means to connect the hundreds of public data files in each state across a broad range of opportunity, resource, and outcome data important for school improvement using the metadata (the data about the data), making the data “FAIR”: Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable. For the first time, this brief details how this new resource of a FAIR-aligned metadata catalog empowers educational leaders and community stakeholders to ask new types of questions that bring together these various kinds of public education data around the important evidence-based improvement goals of their schools.