The New Era of K12 Rostering: What Every Edtech Vendor Needs to Know
How rostering has shifted from costly third-party and homegrown systems to a new era powered by open standards, AI, and modern private-label infrastructure
This article explores how rostering has shifted from costly third-party and homegrown systems to a new era powered by open standards, AI, and modern private-label infrastructure. It outlines seven key insights edtech vendors need in 2025 to cut costs, scale faster, and turn rostering into a true growth engine.
Our Early Days of Rostering
In 2008, when my co-founders and I launched MasteryConnect (a formative assessment platform acquired by Instructure), rostering was anything but elegant. In fact, it was down right messy. To make rostering work, and to avoid having teachers manually typing in data, we had to collect the core records from a student information system (SIS) at the district, including data about students, teachers, parents, courses, classes, enrollments, and more. We often referred to this as “core rostering” data. Getting the data involved an arduous process of communicating with district IT staff to share formatting examples of the data we needed. This would inevitably lead to an arduous back and forth to ensure that transfer credentials were correct and the CSV files (think multiple spreadsheets of data) were formatted correctly and met our specifications for proper processing. The process was slow and frustrating, creating constant integration headaches for customers. It drained valuable time from our support and implementation teams, forced us to build and maintain custom infrastructure, and ultimately delayed rollouts to schools and districts.
The next decade brought about new players with different approaches to the edtech rostering challenge. Clever offered districts free single sign-on dashboards in exchange for access to their rostering data, which it wrapped in a proprietary data model and charged edtech vendors for access. ClassLink inverted this with a much friendlier model for vendors—charging districts for tools while giving edtech vendors free access to data through the open OneRoster standard. These competing approaches defined much of the market, but neither fully addressed EdTech vendors’ fundamental infrastructure challenges, and neither achieved comprehensive market penetration or coverage.
Over time, the term “rostering” for us expanded well beyond its original scope of simply handling core roster data. As districts demanded more from vendor integrations, such as multiple single sign-on methods, extended data domains (attendance, discipline, calendar, assessment data, etc.), data augmentations, data transformations, and LMS integrations, we often lumped it all together and referred to these interoperability challenges as simply “rostering.”
Rostering At A Crossroad
By 2018, we hit a crossroad. Problems that we thought had been solved (with the expensive data fees we were paying) only compounded into more work and infrastructure that we built and maintained. We were battling:
Rostering data fees ballooning well into six figures and trending toward seven.
Homegrown sync systems that were expensive to build and maintain; connection adapters, batch processing systems, sync scheduling, logging systems, data validation tools, referential integrity checks, SFTP infrastructure, OneRoster pipelines, EdFi data ingestion—all without the observability, change detection, or the monitoring and alerting that we desperately needed. Support and implementation teams felt the pain, and we were escalating problems constantly to senior engineers. We were spending over half a million dollars annually on just building our own tooling and infrastructure.
SSO sprawl. Every district expected us to say “Yes” to their various methods for single sign-on, which meant supporting ALL possible district SSO options: Microsoft, Google, Clever, ClassLink, OAuth2, OpenID, SAML, LDAP, LTI and more.
LMS overload. The rise of learning management systems added even more weight to the challenges, and this trend was supercharged by the pandemic in the years following. Google Classroom, Canvas, Schoology, and others required LTI-based connections (or custom integrations) and more homegrown infrastructure.
The result was an out of control rostering bill and a tax on our growth and time—pulling us away from why we started MasteryConnect in the first place: to build a great platform for teachers and students. Instead, we were stuck wrestling with infrastructure problems, and gross margins being squeezed by high operating costs. We knew that when we started our next company, we wanted to help other EdTech developers, founders, and companies break free from the rostering grind, slash bloated costs, and innovate to flip rostering from a cost center into a growth engine.
A New Era of Rostering
Today, the rostering and interoperability landscape is ripe for change, and is indeed shifting rapidly. Companies are beginning to take control of their own data pipelines, powered by open standards, off-the-shelf infrastructure platforms, and the growing use of AI. Access to student data beyond the basics of identity and course enrollment has become the critical foundation for AI to deliver transformational impact in education.
OneRoster has reached a critical mass with support by all major SIS companies in the space. CSV files are still part of the reality, but AI can now help us map, cleanse, validate, and transform data to open standards without endless back-and-forth with districts. Combined with the support of organizations like 1EdTech and EdFi, and with SIS platforms offering both API and CSV-based OneRoster connections, we are finally moving away from expensive rostering tolls toward secure and direct data access.
After living through these rostering challenges at MasteryConnect, we ultimately started our next company, Ednition, to build the kind of infrastructure we always wished we’d had. Our platform, RosterStream, gives edtech vendors a rostering and interoperability foundation they can rely on—without the need to reinvent the rostering infrastructure wheel. It’s the same pattern we’ve seen in other industries: as shared tooling matures, what was once a hidden cost transforms into an accelerant for scale.
What You Need to Know About Rostering in 2025
Rostering has come a long way from those messy days back in 2008. What used to be a hidden tax on growth is now becoming an engine for scale. With open standards maturing, infrastructure tools catching up, and AI taking friction out of the messiest parts of the process, edtech leaders in 2025 face both new opportunities and new expectations. What once felt like a drain on resources is now opening doors to faster integrations, lower costs, and stronger district relationships.
Here are 7 things you need to know to about today’s rostering landscape to stay ahead:
1. Rostering directly with ANY Student Information System is now scalable, and avoids expensive data fees. Expensive data fees are no longer a requirement. OneRoster has reached critical mass in the market, and off-the-shelf infrastructure tools (like RosterStream) can connect you directly to ANY student information system. If you have multiple applications, you can avoid paying tolls for each, and integrate with a district just once.
2. SSO and LMS fragmentation are no longer a barrier. A single rostering infrastructure tool can now handle every identity provider and LMS integration, so you can confidently say “Yes” to all district SSO and LMS integration requests. And, districts can roster directly from the SIS, all while keeping their preferred SSO provider.
3. Observability and monitoring are essential. Managing the complexity of rostering in one system with change detection, logs, monitoring, alerting, and easy-to-use support interfaces isn’t just a nice-to-have—it’s the difference between scale and chaos.
4. Extended data domains are here and required in the AI era. Rostering now reaches far beyond the “core rostering” of teachers, students, and classes. “Extended Data Domains” (as they are called in the EdFi standard) such as attendance, calendars, bell schedules, discipline, assessment data, and more are unlocking powerful AI-driven workflows in education. And with standards like Ed-Fi shaping the landscape, data is flowing more seamlessly than ever.
5. Security and compliance are non-negotiable. With recent large-scale data breaches at major edtech companies, security attestations and certifications like SOC 2, ISO, FERPA, and GDPR are mandatory realities. Real-time anomaly detection and security-first application design are now table stakes.
6. Vendor independence builds trust. Districts value working directly with the product they bought. If your rostering and data pipelines carry your brand, you (not a third party) own the trust and reliability conversation.
7. Support efficiency is now a growth lever. Rostering observability, monitoring, and alerting systems provide support and implementation teams with the ability to solve problems without escalations to engineering, speeding onboarding and strengthening district relationships. This means your engineers can focus on your core product roadmap.
Across all of this, AI is fundamentally reshaping the process, eliminating messy CSV transformations, automating mappings, performing data validations, providing sync summaries, and surfacing insights. Vendors save money, districts save time, and everyone gets to value faster.
The Bottom Line
Rostering in 2025 is defined by mature industry data standards, scalable direct-to-district connections supported by off-the-shelf infrastructure, and AI-driven automation. Rostering for the AI era has gone beyond the “core” rostering data sets, and has expanded into broader domains, enabling new workflows and possibilities. The rostering infrastructure of today allows EdTech companies to scale with confidence—without being weighed down by infrastructure costs, data access fees, or constant integration challenges. Infrastructure tools like Ednition’s RosterStream are raising the bar for what’s possible, and flipping the model, shifting rostering from being a hidden tax to becoming a growth enabler.
For edtech leaders, the question is no longer if this shift will happen. It already has. The real question is whether your organization is ready to seize the opportunity.
About the Author
Mick Hewitt is the co-founder & CEO of Ednition. Ednition is transforming the K-12 edtech landscape by eliminating vendor-side infrastructure challenges like rostering, secure data syncing, SSO, and LMS integrations. Its flagship platform, RosterStream, empowers edtech companies to seamlessly integrate with any SIS or third-party data provider, supporting schools and districts of all sizes. If you’re ready to turn rostering into an advantage instead of a burden, visit our website to book a demo.
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