Moving Toward Better K–12 Student Data Infrastructure: Lessons Learned from an Exploratory Initiative
Project Background
Across the K–12 education sector, student data is essential for supporting students, evaluating programs, conducting research, and driving continuous improvement. Yet access to that data remains fragmented, slow, and resource-intensive.
School districts receive data requests from a growing number of trusted partners, including nonprofit organizations, researchers, and education technology providers. Fulfilling those requests often requires significant manual effort from district staff. Data may be delivered through custom extracts, spreadsheets, secure file transfers, or other district-specific processes. Even when data is successfully shared, organizations frequently spend substantial time cleaning, standardizing, and reconciling it before it can be used.
This initiative began with a simple question: could shared K–12 technology infrastructure be leveraged to make student performance data easier to share securely and responsibly?
Learning Collider and City Year formed a consortium to explore whether Clever’s existing data-sharing infrastructure could be extended beyond rostering and single sign-on to include student performance data, beginning with attendance. The long-term vision was to create a scalable pathway for districts to share authorized student performance data—including attendance, grades, assessments, and other outcomes—with trusted partners through infrastructure districts already use. Through the consortium’s work, Learning Collider represented the research community's interest in developing this new infrastructure, while City Year represented the interests of organizations providing support services in schools.
An important aspect of this vision was not simply leveraging Clever’s technical integrations with student information systems, but also building upon the governance infrastructure Clever had already established. Districts already use Clever to manage permissions, control which application providers receive data, and maintain audit logs and access records. The consortium hypothesized that extending these existing governance capabilities to student performance data could provide a practical path toward more secure, transparent, and scalable data sharing.
Attendance was selected as the initial focus because it is both highly actionable and broadly relevant. Chronic absenteeism remains one of the most pressing challenges facing schools nationwide, particularly in the years following the COVID-19 pandemic, when absenteeism rates increased substantially and have yet to fully return to pre-pandemic levels. Unlike annual assessments or end-of-term grades, attendance data is generated daily and can support timely interventions, program management, research, and evaluation efforts.
Over the course of the project, the consortium interviewed nonprofit organizations, researchers, and district data leaders while also supporting proof-of-concept activities in Tulsa and Dallas. These efforts provided valuable insight into both the opportunities and challenges associated with expanding student data infrastructure.
Building on Existing Infrastructure
Data interoperability in K–12 education is notoriously difficult. School districts operate a variety of student information systems, assessment platforms, and local data processes. Data definitions vary across districts and states. Student privacy requirements create additional layers of complexity. Any solution must account for technical, legal, operational, and governance considerations simultaneously.
One of the core hypotheses behind this initiative was that many of these challenges had already been addressed through Clever’s existing infrastructure.
Rather than attempting to build a new data-sharing ecosystem from scratch, the consortium explored whether existing infrastructure could be extended to support new categories of student data. Clever already maintained relationships with thousands of districts, had established integrations with major student information systems, and had developed governance tools that allow districts to control access to student information while maintaining visibility into how data is shared.
In many respects, this hypothesis was validated. The project demonstrated that student performance data could be incorporated into this existing framework while preserving district governance and privacy protections, though additional development work would be required to achieve full feature parity with Clever’s existing data sharing capabilities around rosters, schedules and student demographics. The work showed that it is technically feasible to extend established K–12 infrastructure to support additional categories of student data without requiring districts to adopt entirely new systems or governance models.
The value of this existing trust became especially apparent during conversations with pilot districts. Because district leaders were already familiar with Clever and understood its role within their technology ecosystems, discussions could focus on the proposed functionality rather than first establishing trust in an unfamiliar platform. This reinforced the importance of leveraging infrastructure that districts already know and use when pursuing new approaches to data sharing.
Clarifying the Opportunity
Interviews conducted throughout the project confirmed substantial interest in improved access to student performance data.
For nonprofit organizations, more frequent access to attendance information could support student case management, intervention planning, family engagement, and program evaluation. For researchers, standardized access to attendance and other student outcomes could reduce the burden associated with acquiring and preparing data for analysis. For education technology providers, student performance data could support product improvement and impact measurement.
The need was often practical and immediate.
For example, City Year staff described situations in which attendance data is received from some district partners only a few times each year. By the time the information arrives, opportunities for intervention may have already passed. More frequent access to attendance information would allow student success teams to identify attendance concerns earlier, monitor progress over time, and better target support for students who need it most.
Other nonprofit organizations described spending significant staff time manually importing district-provided attendance files into case management systems or waiting for periodic data updates before they could assess whether interventions were having the desired effect.
Researchers identified similar challenges. While data-sharing agreements often represent the largest hurdle, researchers emphasized that substantial effort is also required after agreements are in place. District-specific file formats, inconsistent definitions, and manual data transfers create significant delays and costs. More standardized access to attendance and outcome data could help support program evaluations, chronic absenteeism research, and multi-district studies focused on student outcomes.
At the same time, the project clarified which use cases appear well-served by the envisioned functionality and which would require complementary approaches.
Summary of researcher use case exploration findings
Summary of nonprofit practitioner use case exploration findings
The project reinforced that the proposed solution could address many meaningful use cases, particularly those focused on student support, continuous improvement, and evaluation. At the same time, it clarified that student performance data infrastructure should be viewed as an enabling layer rather than a complete solution to all data-sharing challenges.
The Economics of Infrastructure Development
As the project progressed, the consortium gained a deeper understanding of what it takes to build and sustain shared data infrastructure. While the work demonstrated significant interest in expanded access to attendance data for research, evaluation, and student support purposes, it also highlighted the importance of aligning product development with the needs of a broad and diverse set of users. Long-term investment in data infrastructure depends not only on technical feasibility and potential impact, but also on sustainable demand that supports ongoing development, maintenance, and growth.
One of the project's key lessons is that infrastructure serving the public good is strongest when the needs of nonprofit organizations, researchers, educators, and commercial partners intersect. The consortium identified meaningful opportunities for attendance data to support educational outcomes and student success, while also gaining a clearer understanding of the conditions needed for such solutions to scale. Looking ahead, we remain encouraged by the progress made through this work and hopeful that Clever and other technology providers will commit to approaches that expand their products and provide access to high-quality student data in ways that are sustainable, valuable, and broadly beneficial to the education community.
Looking Forward
The need that motivated this work remains unchanged.
Districts continue to face growing demands for data sharing while operating under significant capacity constraints. Nonprofit organizations continue to need timely information to support students effectively. Researchers continue to encounter barriers that slow the generation of evidence. Chronic absenteeism remains a national concern. And funders continue to seek stronger ways of understanding which interventions improve outcomes for students.
At the same time, the project provided greater clarity about the pathways most likely to advance this work.
Consortium members continue to view Clever as an important and influential part of the K–12 data ecosystem. City Year is exploring opportunities to leverage Clever’s existing capabilities, including roster and scheduling data infrastructure that may support operational improvements today. The consortium also intends to maintain relationships with Clever and continue advocating for the use cases identified through this work.
At the same time, future progress cannot depend on a single implementation pathway. Consortium members have begun exploring alternative approaches, including open-source and community-driven infrastructure models that may be less dependent on commercial product economics while still addressing the needs identified through this initiative.
Conclusion
This initiative did not ultimately result in the fully realized student performance data platform originally envisioned. However, it accomplished something important: it significantly reduced uncertainty around a promising infrastructure opportunity.
The project confirmed meaningful demand for improved student data access. It demonstrated that existing infrastructure can be extended to support secure sharing of student performance data while preserving district governance and privacy controls. It identified high-value use cases across nonprofit, research, and education technology communities. And it surfaced the technical, operational, and economic conditions that influence whether promising infrastructure concepts become sustainable products.
Perhaps most importantly, the work demonstrated that the primary challenge is not simply technical. The technology required to support many of these use cases appears achievable. The larger challenge lies in aligning incentives, adoption, sustainability, and investment across a diverse ecosystem of stakeholders.
For funders interested in improving education data infrastructure, this may be the most important takeaway. The need is real, the use cases are compelling, and the potential public value is significant. Realizing that value, however, will likely require continued collaboration among districts, nonprofit organizations, researchers, technology providers, and philanthropy to create the conditions necessary for long-term success.
The consortium leaves this work with a deeper understanding of both the opportunity and the challenges ahead, and with a stronger foundation for future efforts to improve student data access across the K–12 ecosystem.
Acknowledgements: The work detailed above was completed with generous support from Arnold Ventures and the Overdeck Family Foundation. Consortium Members:
Dan Jarratt, Strategic Advisor
Jon Randall, Head of Education Partnerships, Learning Collider
Riddhima Mishra, VP of Operations at Learning Collider
Tania Shinkawa, Director of Enterprise Strategy & Planning, City Year
Taylor Smith, Data Engineer, City Year
