Kansas Education Data Exchange (KED-X)
The mission of the Kansas State Department of Education (KSDE) is to support all Kansas school districts in collecting and reporting data to fulfill the Kansas State Board of Education’s (KSBE) mission to prepare Kansas students for lifelong success through rigorous, quality academic instruction, career training and character development according to each student’s gifts and talents. Specifically, KSDE believes a successful Kansas high school graduate has the academic preparation, cognitive preparation, technical skills, employability skills and civic engagement to be successful in postsecondary education, in the attainment of an industry recognized certification or in the workforce, without the need for remediation.
KSDE is committed to improving education outcomes through a variety of efforts. Enhancing the current SLDS by implementing a statewide automated data collection solution will ultimately empower teachers, parents, and students with actionable data to inform student-centered decisions. The goal is to provide pertinent student education data to educators in “real-time” to promote a holistic educational approach and ensure equitable outcomes for all students.
This project will leverage two national educational standards: the Common Education Data Standards (CEDS) and the Ed-Fi Data Standard. Districts and vendors will only interface with the Ed-Fi Data Standard through the Ed-Fi API.
Data Standards
Common Education Data Standards (CEDS) |  |
It includes:
- A common vocabulary
- Data models that reflect the vocabulary
- Tools to help educator stakeholders understand and use to help educate an assembly of metadata from other education data initiatives
- A community of educator stakeholders who discuss the uses of CEDS and development of the standard
Ed-Fi Data Standard |  |
The Ed-Fi Data Standard is a community-led, open-source, CEDS-aligned, and widely adopted standard. The Ed-Fi Data Standard focuses on the kindergarten through 12th grade (K-12) enterprise data model and has limited coverage of early learning, post secondary, and other data domains. The Ed-Fi Alliance has released technology assets, including a RESTful Application Programming Interface (REST API), the Ed-Fi API, and an Operational Data Store (ODS) that supports real-time integration and organization of commonly shared K-12 data from disparate source systems in a school district, other local education agency (LEA), or state education agency (SEA). For example, data from a SIS, a Learning Management System, local assessments, state assessments, a special education system, and other systems can be brought together into a unifying, open data model for operational and analytical use cases. This can be done in an automated, real-time manner if the systems support the Ed-Fi API. In this way, as changes occur in the source systems, the changes are reflected in Ed-Fi API calls and applied real-time to the Ed-Fi ODS. The Ed-Fi Data Standard and Technology also supports bulk uploads as a fallback mechanism to load data.
The data model of the Ed-Fi Data Standard includes core concepts of entities, which are classifiers for objects (e.g., Student, Parent, Staff, Assessment), attributes, which are entity properties (e.g., Student First Name, Assessment Raw Score), associations, which are relationships between entities, and descriptors, which are customizable enumerations of values such as codes.