The Edlink Public Data Initiative is a free, community-driven repository of public information about learning institutions and educational technology companies. It exists to solve a familiar problem in edtech: finding clean, accurate data about schools, districts, universities, and companies is hard. Without a shared source of truth, products and organizations accumulate duplicates, errors (and so on), making it harder for organizations to work together effectively.
Goals of the Initiative
Our mission is to build the most complete and correct dataset of publicly available information. We want to:
- Establish a common source of truth so districts, LEAs, vendors, and developers can stay organized and reduce the risks that come from bad or mismatched organization data.
- Keep the dataset free and open so broad adoption is possible. Paywalls and walled gardens work against building an authoritative reference that many products can rely on.
- Build with the community, not in isolation. We need administrators, vendors, and developers to integrate, verify, and correct the data over time.
Current Features
At its core, the initiative is a structured database of educational entities (institutions and companies) with stable, unique identifiers and details that change over time (for example, district mergers or schools opening / closing).
You can access the data in several ways:
- Browse institutions and companies directly.
- Sign up, create API keys, and integrate the dataset into your own products.
- Embed pre-built UI components (such as institution search) into your application.
The dataset is designed for real product workflows - things like: institution search during signup, deduplicating organizations, aligning records with partners, improving reporting, and grouping freemium users by organization.
What's Next
The initiative is still early. Near-term priorities include expanding beyond the United States and deepening organizational hierarchy to cover more levels of the education system, including regional and state-level departments and agencies.
Administrators and companies can claim organizations they control to help keep records accurate. Anyone can report issues on entities they don't control. If you build on the dataset, you help create the network effects that make a shared reference valuable for everyone.