One clear example of the impact of interoperability work in education comes from Michigan, where the state built MiRead — a system that shows what's possible when literacy data isn't siloed across disconnected tools.
Before MiRead, Michigan educators faced a familiar interoperability problem: assessment results, reading plans, and instructional strategies lived in separate systems that didn't talk to each other. Teachers had to manually pull information together and track intervention plans by hand, often delaying support for struggling readers by weeks.
By building MiRead on the Ed-Fi Data Standard, Michigan connected these previously fragmented data sources into one unified system for students in kindergarten through third grade. Assessment results now flow automatically into the platform, personalized reading plans update continuously as students progress, and the system surfaces instructional strategies teachers can act on immediately — all without manual data-wrangling.
This is a concrete illustration of what standards-based interoperability makes possible: not just cleaner data pipelines, but faster, more targeted support reaching students who need it. Early pilots in districts like Detroit and Lansing have shown positive reading score trends, and state and district leaders now have real-time visibility to direct resources where they matter most.
MiRead also demonstrates how interoperability work compounds over time — it's built on the same underlying Ed-Fi infrastructure as Michigan's broader statewide Data Hub, showing how a shared data standard can support multiple use cases (compliance, dyslexia screening, early intervention) without requiring separate, redundant systems. Michigan's plans to integrate MiRead with other school-improvement systems and expand statewide reflect the kind of incremental, standards-first approach that makes interoperability investments durable rather than one-off fixes.
This Story from the Field is a supplement to the 2026 Project Unicorn State of the Sector Report which analyzes K-12 school system capabilities and infrastructure for leveraging education data. Read the full report.
