As a New York City public school teacher, I am incredibly excited about Clever. When I started working at my current school, we had an "inquiry team", whose job it was to download spreadsheets from the myriad of different services and databases used by the Department of Education (as well as those adopted by my school in addition). The team would then go through the downloaded spreadsheets and try to make sense of the data by copying and pasting columns from one sheet to the other. The team consisted of about 5 teachers who spent hours of their own time doing this.

I wrote some database software that took a lot of the hurt out of the process. Pop in the data in CSV format and it crunches all of the numbers and connects all the dots. That said, the whole workflow is still a bit of a pain. Most of the data is locked up in silos lacking any sort of API, but sporting a user interface that compels a little piece of my soul to shrivel up every time I have to log in and download the CSVs. Additionally, I have to bother the school support staff because I don't even have access to some of the data. Each different data source requires me to write a different parser. In the mean time, I still have to plan lessons and teach kids.

I've kicked the tires on the Clever API and it's fantastic for my purposes. They've done some incredibly cool stuff to make it easy to access data I've previously struggled to get my hands on. I'm really excited about the work they're doing and super-excited for more partners to come on board and use their API. It's going to change the way we deal with student data and ultimately get quicker information out to our teachers so that they can make better instructional decisions for our students.