Here's a thing that happens over and over. Someone asks a question about their district that should take five minutes to answer - how does our chronic absenteeism compare to the district next door, what has enrollment done over the last few years - and it turns into a scavenger hunt. The data is public. It's out there. It's also spread across a state department of education site, three PDFs, a spreadsheet with merged header cells, and a download link that 404s.
So we built a place to put it: data.standardeducation.com.
What it is
A home for public school data - collected, cleaned up, and put somewhere you can actually use it. Not a sales tool. Not another dashboard you have to log into. Public data, publicly available.
We're starting with Georgia and Kansas. Those are the two states we know best, and where we have enough district relationships to get told when something looks off. From there we're adding a new state every three to four weeks.
Why we're doing it
Partly self-interest, honestly. We work with this data every day, and we were already doing the collection and cleanup for ourselves. Keeping it in a private folder felt dumb.
The bigger reason is that the gap between public and usable is where a lot of good questions go to die. A school board member who wants to know how their district stacks up. A researcher. A reporter on deadline. A superintendent who just wants the number and doesn't want to file a request to get it. None of those people should need a data engineer.
What's next
A new state every three to four weeks. If yours is one you'd like to see sooner, tell us and we'll move it up the list. Same goes if you spot something wrong - and at some point you probably will. This kind of work is never done being wrong somewhere.
Go poke around: data.standardeducation.com