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%.
Industry: Education
Also in the data model catalog
This standard shows up on both sides of the house — as a standard applied in API operations here, and as a data model defining what information exists. Same standard, two lenses.
See it as a data model →