A question comes up in almost every district conversation we have, usually from the technology director or the data coordinator. The person who has to make this thing actually work after everybody else has gone back to their building.
"Is Standard Education a data warehouse?"
The answer is yes. The reason I don't just say "yes" and move on is that data warehouse means about six different things depending on who's asking, and a couple of those things we're not. So here's the long version, roughly in the order it comes up.
Is Standard Education a data warehouse?
Yes.
Every night we pull your student data out of your source systems, put it in one place, keep the history, and let you query it directly. That's a data warehouse – the Standard Education Data Warehouse – and everything else we sell sits on top of it.
What ends up in there?
Attendance. Enrollment and demographics. Behavior and discipline. Assessment results from MAP Growth, i-Ready, Amplify. Screening results from SRSS-IE and SRSS-EC. Anything your SIS can export, plus anything you upload through the assessment uploader.
We sync nightly from PowerSchool, Infinite Campus, and Tyler SIS. We're SIS-agnostic though – if your system can produce an export, we can ingest it. Dashboards reflect the previous day's data.
Can we get at the data ourselves?
Four ways:
The Metabase piece matters more than it sounds. Direct database access is great if you've got somebody on staff who writes SQL, and a lot of the districts we work with don't have that person and aren't going to hire them. So we include the BI tool too, which means a curriculum director can go build her own chart on a Tuesday without filing a ticket with anybody – us or her own IT department.
Direct connection means direct, though. You get your district's full schema and it's documented. Write your own SQL, hand it to whoever on your team likes that sort of thing.
I'll be honest that this is the part of the answer people don't expect. Once a district can query your schema you can't hide behind the dashboards you designed, and a lot of platforms in this space would rather not open that door. We'd rather open it. If you can't get your own data out, it isn't really your data.
So what's the BI layer?
The dashboards. District level, school level, individual student level, organized around the things schools actually run on – attendance, academics, behavior, demographics, MTSS.
That's the part that gets demoed, so most people assume that's the product. It isn't. It's the thin part. The dashboards are a view of the warehouse, and if we deleted every one of them tomorrow the data would still be sitting there, still queryable, still yours.
Which means there are really two BI layers here – ours, which has a point of view, and the Metabase license, which doesn't and isn't supposed to.
What do you mean by "opinionated"?
Best example I've got.
Almost everybody defines chronic absenteeism the same way – a student has missed 10% or more of their enrolled days – and we calculate it the standard way: (excused absences + unexcused absences) / total days enrolled.
But we also carry a tier a lot of systems don't:
- Chronic – 10% or more of enrolled days missed
- At Risk – 5% to 9.99% of enrolled days missed
- Satisfactory – less than 5% of enrolled days missed
That At Risk tier is an opinion. Nothing in the data demands it. We put it there because a student sitting at 8% in November is a student you can still do something about, and a system that only lights up at 10% is a system that tells you once it's too late to matter.
Same idea runs through the screeners, the MTSS tier rollups, and how we lay out a student profile. Those are artifacts built on the warehouse – calculations and cut points and workflows that carry a point of view about what you'd want to do differently if you knew.
You can disagree with our cut points. That's the nice thing about the direct connection: go compute it your way.
Do all your products really run on the same warehouse?
Yes, and I think this is the part that matters most.
All of it on the same Standard Education Data Warehouse. One nightly sync, same student, same roster, same history, across every one of them.
Which means when you add a product you're not starting another integration project. No second data agreement, no second sync to babysit, nobody going back to your SIS admin asking for another export. The data is already there. You're turning something on.
It also means your screening data isn't stranded. An SRSS-IE result sits next to that student's attendance and their assessment history, because it's in the same warehouse – not in a screening tool that emails you a PDF.
What if we want to load something you don't have a dashboard for?
We'll ingest it.
Transportation, food service, CTE, gradebook – if you can export it, we can land it in your warehouse and you can query it, dashboard or no dashboard. Plenty of useful things start life as a table nobody built a screen for yet.
Do you replace our SIS?
No, and we're not trying to.
Your SIS is your system of record. It's where enrollment happens, where attendance gets taken, where the official numbers live. We're the integrated analytical copy sitting downstream of it. If we ever disagree with your SIS, your SIS wins.
We're also not your state reporting pipeline (GA FTE aside), and we're not an enterprise warehouse for HR, finance, and facilities. Student data is the whole scope. We like it that way.
What's on the roadmap?
Three things I'd rather say out loud than have you find on a call.
Full-fidelity retention. Today we store the fields we've mapped for your district. If your SIS carries a field nothing in our product uses, we don't keep it right now. We're moving to landing everything you send us and keeping it, mapped or not – storage is cheap, and the field you end up needing is always the one nobody mapped.
Load transparency for districts. We can see what synced, what didn't, and what failed. You can't – you have to ask us. That's backwards for a warehouse you're querying directly, so putting sync status and record counts in front of you is on the list.
Point-in-time views in the interface. The warehouse keeps dated history, so what a student's enrollment, school, and grade were last November is in there. Looking at it that way in our interface isn't built yet. Honestly, nobody's really asked us for it, which tells me it isn't urgent – but it's the kind of thing you want the first time you're trying to work out whether an intervention actually did anything.
Why should any of this matter to us?
Because most districts we talk to have been told they need a data warehouse, gotten a number back, and quietly shelved it. Warehouse projects are expensive, they run for quarters, and at the end of one you have a warehouse with nothing sitting on it.
You already need the warehouse. You also need somebody to have already built the attendance tiers, the screeners, and the MTSS rollups on top of it, so the thing shows up useful instead of showing up empty.
That's the whole pitch. It's a warehouse. The dashboards are just the part you can see.