To the Editor:
I have just read the article titled “Data-Sharing Challenges in Spotlight as inBloom Sputters to a Shutdown.”
While I agree with the general public’s new focus on data exchanges in education, the entire marketplace has been actively providing solutions for the past two decades, and it was missed in your piece.
The Systems Interoperability Framework—known in North America as the Schools Interoperability Framework, or SIF—is a nonprofit membership organization made up of thousands of schools, districts, state educational agencies, federal agencies, and vendors in North America, the United Kingdom, and Australia. These diverse stakeholders—in the management, movement, and usage of education data—have together built openly developed and freely acceptable technical blueprints that allow for the safe and secure sharing of data.
The SIF community does not collect data or have anything to sell, which differs from all of the other data initiatives outlined in the article.
The SIF data model and infrastructure are in use in hundreds of marketplace products and in thousands of schools in every state in the union. SIF also has a quality-control-certification program, providing quality assurance to the marketplace, that grows every day.
Our community has the experts in building and implementing these systems and has been addressing these issues for years.
Larry Fruth II
Executive Director and Chief Executive Officer
SIF Association
Washington, D.C
