Building the Urban Institute's Education Data Platform

The Urban Institute produces some of the best education policy research in the country — school funding equity, teacher workforce data, student outcomes across states. The problem was that it was all locked up in dense PDF reports. Researchers read them. Policymakers didn't. The team knew their data could change how superintendents and state legislators made decisions, but they couldn't get it in front of those people in a format that was actually usable.

We worked with their research team to build an interactive platform that let people explore the data themselves. The tricky part was respecting the nuance — policy data is full of caveats and context that you can't just strip away to make a pretty chart. We spent time with district administrators and state ed agency staff to understand what questions they were actually trying to answer, then designed the interface around those questions instead of around the dataset structure.

On the technical side, we used a headless CMS for editorial content, D3.js for the visualization layer, and a static generation pipeline to keep load times fast. That last part mattered more than you'd think — a lot of rural school districts are working with slow connections and older machines. We built everything to WCAG 2.1 AA and added progressive enhancement so the core data was still accessible even if JavaScript didn't load. When your audience includes people on ten-year-old government laptops, you design for that.

Six months after launch, the platform had visitors from every U.S. state and over two million unique users. But the number that mattered more to the Urban Institute was that their research started showing up in state legislative sessions and school board meetings at a much higher rate. The data was always good — it just needed a better way to reach the people making decisions.