The Ed-Fi Data Standard is a unified data model and REST API specification for K-12 education data, stewarded by the Ed-Fi Alliance and funded originally by the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation. It covers students, staff, schools, enrollment, attendance, assessment and discipline, and is deployed at state and district scale in the US.
Ed-Fi
Ed-Fi is what happens when the funder of an education data standard is a philanthropy rather than a vendor consortium: the model is published in full, the API specification is open, and reference implementations exist. It is the closest thing K-12 has to public data infrastructure.
- A unified data model - One model across student, staff, school, assessment and behaviour domains.
- A published REST API - Not just a schema — a described interface with an OpenAPI definition.
- Operational data store - A reference implementation districts and states actually deploy.
- State-scale adoption - Several US states run Ed-Fi as their statewide education data backbone.
Ed-Fi sits on the right side of the divide The State of Education & EdTech APIs measures. Its sponsor operates infrastructure rather than certifying vendors, and it publishes the interface rather than the badge — the same pattern that puts the scholarly registries at 70.8% publication while the certified classroom vendors sit at 15.9%.
Referenced in API Evangelist papers
This standard shows up in my published research. These reports read the machine-readable evidence provider by provider — and put this standard in the context of a real sector.
The State of Education & EdTech APIs
A K-12 data standard whose sponsor operates infrastructure rather than certifying vendors — the same pattern that separates the scholarly layer's 70.8% publication rate from K-12's 15.9%.
