Strategic Use of Education Data Rubric
History of the Strategic Data Use Rubric
Since its founding in 2008, the Strategic Data Project (SDP) has worked alongside more than 300 education agencies and postsecondary institutions to strengthen their capacity to use data to improve outcomes for students. In 2010, SDP developed the Data Use Rubric, with the support of the Gates Foundation, to give organizations a shared language for examining their data culture, analytic capacity, and leadership practices.
The original rubric helped leaders move beyond a narrow view of data use as a technical function. It encouraged teams to consider the organizational conditions that make data useful: clear goals, strong systems, analytic rigor, leadership commitment, and the ability to translate insight into action.
Since then, the education data landscape has changed substantially. Today’s leaders must navigate evolving expectations around privacy, governance, equity, public trust, cross-sector data sharing, and artificial intelligence, often with limited time and capacity. In response, SDP reimagined the rubric, expanding it into a tool that captures the full range of data functions and organizational needs across education settings, now called the Strategic Use of Education Data Rubric, or the Strategic Data Use Rubric for short.
The updated rubric was shaped by feedback from more than 30 SDP fellows and alumni, as well as intensive guidance from a committee of five affiliates working across early education, state systems, postsecondary institutions, and K–12 districts. This breadth of practitioner input is unusual among data-capacity tools and ensures that the rubric reflects both the shared challenges and distinct realities facing education organizations.
Download the Strategic Data Use Rubric
The Strategic Data Use Rubric is organized around four pillars: Strategic Data Leadership, Actionable Analyses, Quality Data Systems, and People-First Communication. It is designed as a reflection and planning tool, not a test or single-score assessment. The rubric helps teams identify strengths, surface priorities, and track progress as they build the organizational capacity to move from data infrastructure to insight and meaningful impact.
The Rubric's Impact in Practice
SDP has piloted the rubric beyond its fellowship programs, partnering directly with local education agencies to administer it as a digital tool across multiple agency employees. These engagements combine cross-agency reporting with facilitated discussions that help participants interpret results, identify shared priorities, and move from reflection to action. SDP has also developed customized constructs, beyond those included in the public tool, to examine agency capacity in areas such as postsecondary data partnership use and access to state longitudinal data systems.
Kristen Erichsen
Engaging with the SDP’s data use rubric and landscape assessment services helped our organization build a shared understanding of how we engage with data and where we can improve. As an organization, we are now moving towards building more coordinated and sustainable data practices using a newly developed shared language.
James McCabe
The Strategic Data Use Rubric helped us recognize that improving data use is not only about collecting more information or building better dashboards. Our initial results revealed significant differences in how staff perceived our data practices. That prompted us to communicate our work more clearly and begin sharing recurring snapshots of data use. For me, the experience reinforced that a strong data culture depends as much on transparency, communication, and shared understanding as it does on the systems themselves.
Kathryn Zimmerman
The rubric and all its pillars put language to the current state of actionable analyses in our district and provides a clear roadmap for where we need to go.
Marlin Hicks
The Strategic Data Rubric is an extremely strong resource for our campus as we gradually take ownership of our data for more than obligated reporting or grant application.
Bring the SDP Data Use Rubric to Your Organization
SDP offers customized support to help education organizations use the Data Use Rubric as a landscape assessment. Through surveys, facilitated conversations, and analysis, we help leaders understand how effectively their organization uses data and where stronger systems, practices, and capacity are needed. Engagements can be tailored for individual organizations, departments or cross-agency initiatives, or networks of institutions. Interested in exploring an engagement? Contact us to discuss your goals and a customized scope of work.
An engagement can help your organization: