The Michael & Susan Dell Foundation has announced the launch of the Ed-Fi Alliance, a wholly owned nonprofit subsidiary that will offer educators and administrators real-time, actionable education data on every student in their classroom, school, district, or state.

To be headed by Lori Fey, MSDF's former U.S. director of policy, the Austin-based organization will work to provide states and districts with the Ed-Fi solution, a standards-based data tool suite that integrates and organizes raw education data and information from a broad range of sources into Web-based dashboards, reports, and other applications. Available free under license to districts, state education agencies, and vendors, the suite includes a unifying data model, a data exchange and application framework, and sample dashboard source code. Developed by Double Line Partners with funding from MSDF, the solution also makes it possible for school and district administrators as well as state and federal agencies to supplement or replace tools used for state or federal accountability reporting purposes.

Ten states — Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Delaware, Kansas, Louisiana, New Mexico, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas — currently license the Ed-Fi solution directly, while four other states benefit from partnerships with inBloom — formerly the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's Shared Learning Collaborative — and the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

"Since the launch of the Ed-Fi initiative in July 2011, we have seen increasing demand from states and school districts because they see real time and cost savings advantages created by deploying the Ed-Fi solution within existing IT environments," said MSDF executive director Janet Mountain. "Currently, 36 percent of K-12 students and 39 percent of teachers are poised to benefit from Ed-Fi-enabled solutions....We expect the Ed-Fi solution to help even greater numbers of students in the next two years. The resources and focus required to support this exponential growth merited a stand-alone organization to ensure that these high-quality solutions can quickly get into the hands of teachers and administrators."