Data source

State assessment proficiencies

Bellwork acquires public assessment data from state education agencies independently, normalizes the releases into one product schema, and exposes that schema across the dashboard, API, MCP transport, and AI result surfaces.

i. source record
Source family
State assessment proficiency
Acquisition
Collected independently from public state education agency releases
Primary grain
Entity, school year, subject, grade or all-grades rollup
Headline subjects
Math, English language arts, science when available
Comparison baseline
State-reported state average for the same subject where available
Best use
Within-state district, school, county, and local market context
ii. methodology

One customer-facing schema over fifty different reporting habits.

01 / Acquire

Bellwork collects public assessment releases from each state independently. States publish different files, terms, fields, grades, suppression rules, and update schedules, so acquisition is handled source-by-source rather than through one national feed.

02 / Normalize

State-specific releases are mapped into one Bellwork schema for districts, schools, subjects, grades, school years, proficiency counts or percentages, tested counts, state baselines, and data-quality flags.

03 / Project

The normalized records are projected into fast product tables for dashboard lists, entity panels, filters, map area summaries, API responses, MCP tools, and AI result cards.

04 / Label

Bellwork preserves quality and comparability context in the product surface. Suppressed, partial, unavailable, and unknown values are marked instead of being treated as zero.

iii. product schema

The dashboard is a consumer of the same API-shaped projection used by MCP and AI tools. Product surfaces should not reach around the API to reinterpret raw state files.

Entity summary
District and school headline subject metrics for product lists, cards, and panels.
Grade subject rows
Detail rows for grade-level and EOC-style drilldowns when a user opens an entity.
State summary
State baseline values used for within-state comparison and vs-state deltas.
Area summary
State and county map rollups used by the assessment layer.
Coverage metadata
Source, publication, school-year, and data-quality context for display and API consumers.
iv. quality labels
Complete

The selected entity and subject have a usable current proficiency value.

Partial

The state release is present, but some expected grades, groups, or measures are missing.

Suppressed

The state withheld the value, commonly because the underlying student count is too small.

Unavailable

Bellwork does not have a current public value for that entity, subject, and year.

v. comparability limits

This is state-defined proficiency, not NAEP.

Each state defines its own assessments, grade coverage, cut scores, school-accountability rules, and suppression thresholds. A reported proficiency percentage is therefore most reliable as a within-state local context signal.

Bellwork keeps this source separate from NAEP-style data. State assessment proficiency is useful for district and school operating detail; NAEP is the cleaner source for national cross-state comparisons.