This story focuses on the teacher pipeline rather than K-12 student data directly. The Texas Education Agency (TEA) built its Insight to Impact (I2I) dashboards on the Ed-Fi Data Standard to give educator preparation programs — the institutions that train future teachers — timely visibility into the teacher pipeline, from application through certification to student outcomes. Where this information once took months to compile, programs can now see it in weeks.
Programs use the dashboards to track whether candidates are building the right skills, see where new teachers are hired and what they teach, understand classroom retention trends, and measure student growth linked to teacher effectiveness — turning what used to be pure compliance reporting into a tool for continuous program improvement.
TEA developed I2I in collaboration with educator prep programs, technical vendors, and philanthropic partners, prioritizing simplicity, security, and usability. Programs still submit and verify their own candidate data, which TEA combines with sources like surveys, certification records, and employment data to populate the dashboards, giving programs a centralized view without having to juggle multiple systems themselves. As Texas Christian University's Dr. Cynthia Savage noted, the dashboards make it far easier to see where candidates end up if they leave the classroom — whether into roles like librarian, principal, or other public-school positions.
The benefits flow both ways: prep programs get actionable insight to improve candidate support, while TEA gains the visibility needed for better statewide coordination and strategy. TEA's Dr. Paige Tooley emphasized that shared, quality data strengthens relationships between prep programs and school systems, which in turn supports stronger teacher retention.
TEA continues to expand this work, including a newer tool called TalentEd that gives school systems a fuller view of hiring, retention, and internal career movement (such as support staff becoming teachers), plus new efforts to track how candidates are evaluated during training. More than 120 programs now have timely data access, drawing on over 60 million records across 300+ data types — reinforcing every stage of the educator pipeline to help ensure every Texas classroom has a well-prepared teacher.
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.
