Mike Bronder

The Republic of Georgia's Ministry of Education and Science manages an education ecosystem roughly on scale with New York City, spanning K-12 schools, preschools, universities, and regional centers across a diverse physical and social landscape. Their Education Management Information System (EMIS) had served as the technical backbone for years, but by 2021 faced familiar challenges: technical debt in older systems, inconsistent architecture across subsystems, manual data workflows requiring redundant entry and validation, and limited interoperability forcing institutions to abandon their own systems for EMIS portals. The World Bank's support for modernization under the I2Q Project (Innovation, Inclusion and Quality) signaled Georgia's commitment to European standards alignment, digital transformation, and evidence-based education policy, but realizing that vision required architectural clarity, commitment to interoperability, and a long-term execution plan.

Our work centers on establishing interoperability as infrastructure from the ground up. Rather than committing to a single educational standard or inventing proprietary structures, we've developed a canonical taxonomy based on a crosswalk of international standards including CEDS (Common Education Data Standards), Ed-Fi, SIF, and IMS. We've designed and built an AI-augmented data modeling toolkit that operationalizes this vision, creating real-time maps that can update across international data standards, including versions and extensions like SIF-MA or SIF-NZ.

And with this, we also understand the realities of working with AI, no matter how sophisticated. There has to be accountability for the work it does, so we've built this into an interface that streamlines the review, mapping, justification, and updates to the taxonomy.

The result is a living logical model that serves as the authoritative contract baseline for outsourced development projects, where contractors implement to spec but EMIS retains ownership of the architecture and can change vendors without losing interoperability.

The approach accounts for institutional maturity across the education sector. High-maturity institutions like universities with established SIS platforms push data via standard APIs. Medium-maturity institutions use EMIS tools but follow a clear path toward independence. Low-maturity institutions receive support through regional innovation centers while building capacity. This model reduces EMIS bottlenecks, improves data quality (institutions enter data once, in their own systems), and creates incentives for continuous improvement. The roadmap includes the eSchool upgrade (general education plus preschool), higher education data integration replacing legacy systems, and regional innovation centers supporting digital education adoption.

This work draws directly on our experience with Pennsylvania's Ed-Fi early warning initiative that served over 120 PA districts, Massachusetts SIF integration, and the reengineering of a 35-year-old DOS-based student information system into a modern SaaS platform while keeping live districts operational.

Credalyst is a standards-native credential infrastructure platform built to deliver what education standards bodies have been working toward for more than twenty years: interoperable, portable, federated credentials tied to lifelong learning portfolios. Instead of trapping professional learning records inside isolated district systems, conference platforms, or vendor-specific badge tools, Credalyst creates a shared credential layer where verified achievements can move across institutions, roles, and careers while remaining structured, trustworthy, and usable.

At the core of Credalyst is an interoperability-first architecture grounded in education standards and designed for crosswalks across CEDS, Open Badges, Ed-Fi, SIF, CLR, xAPI, and related frameworks. That makes the platform more than a digital badging tool. It is infrastructure for federation: districts, universities, associations, and training providers can issue credentials locally while contributing to a broader ecosystem in which records remain portable for the learner and legible for downstream reporting, validation, and recognition. The goal is not simply to generate credentials, but to ensure they can travel, connect, and retain meaning across organizational boundaries.

Strategically, Credalyst addresses one of education’s longest-standing infrastructure gaps: professional learning happens everywhere, but the record of that learning is fragmented, non-portable, and rarely owned by the learner. Credalyst turns that fragmented history into a lifelong portfolio that follows the educator, while giving institutions cleaner data, lower verification overhead, and a more durable path to compliance, workforce insight, and cross-system trust. In that sense, Credalyst is not just a product. It is a practical implementation of a long-promised vision for interoperable learning records in education.

Major commercial partner deploying the original Early Warning System and Catalog of Interventions for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, helping shape one of the PDE's early large-scale efforts to use interoperable student data for timely intervention and dropout prevention. We provided design, integration, and development services, along with deep technical advising and extensive onboarding support, to help turn the vision into a practical tool schools could use every day.

This project reflected some of our earliest significant work with Ed-Fi and helped establish our approach to interoperability in K-12: connect systems cleanly, make data more actionable for educators, and build with real implementation in mind from the start. By supporting the integration of student information system data into an educator-facing early warning workflow and intervention catalog, we helped make it easier for school teams to identify students who were beginning to go off track and respond with better-informed supports.

That iteration became the foundation for Pennsylvania’s current system, which remains one of the clearest signs of the project’s long-term value and success. It also stands as an important example of our credibility in large education initiatives, especially where standards-based interoperability, complex stakeholder coordination, and real-world district adoption all have to come together.

• Pennsylvania EWS site
• PDE announcement via PA Principals Association
• IES video: Implementing an Early Warning System at a District
• IES video: PDE Data Summit

We were a major technology partner for the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education and for dozens of school district implementations across the Commonwealth during the multi-year rollout of SIF-based state reporting. We provided design, integration, and development services, along with deep technical advising and onboarding support, helping districts work with live reporting data while state requirements and implementation expectations continued to evolve in real time.

This project became an important early demonstration of what interoperability could make possible in K-12. It showed that ambitious statewide data efforts can succeed even when standards, reporting requirements, and technical expectations are still maturing, as long as the work stays grounded in practical implementation, strong district support, and a clear commitment to data quality. The experience deepened our work with SIF, large-scale validation workflows, district onboarding, and the day-to-day realities of connecting local systems to high-stakes state reporting environments.

The Massachusetts rollout remains an important example of how standards-based interoperability can create real operational value for schools while also laying the groundwork for broader statewide teaching, learning, and reporting systems.

Reengineered one of the first commercially available student information systems, into Vision, a sophisticated and extensible SIS, reporting, and analytics platform built for modern K-12 data needs. The work brought together student information management, operational reporting, dashboards, integrations, and family-facing tools inside a more unified architecture designed to support both day-to-day school operations and longer-term institutional insight.

This project was especially important because it pushed beyond traditional SIS design. By grounding the platform in Ed-Fi architecture patterns, operational data stores, and data lake approaches for longitudinal and cross-domain reporting, we helped move Vision toward a more interoperable and analytically capable model. That made it possible to connect academic, attendance, behavior, scheduling, and other data domains in ways that supported both transactional workflows and broader decision-making over time.

The result was not just a more modern SIS, but a clearer demonstration of how legacy education platforms could be reengineered to support interoperability, role-based access, early warning use cases, and richer reporting across systems. It remains an important example of how thoughtful platform modernization can extend the life of foundational K-12 software while opening the door to far more ambitious data and reporting capabilities.