A small, senior-led practice

Who we are

Edstar Analytics was co-founded by Dr. Janet Johnson and the late Dr. Lee V. Stiff, two educators who saw the same problem from different angles: programs rich in purpose but poor in the data practices that would prove their worth and improve their design. Today Edstar is a tight-knit team of senior consultants, each of whom has spent decades working at the intersection of data, education, and policy.

We are small by design. Every engagement is led by someone with deep subject-matter expertise — not handed down from a partner to a junior analyst. When you email us, you get an actual reply from the person doing the work.

What we believe

Good evaluation is not compliance theater. It is the operating system of a well-run program — the instrument panel that tells program managers what's working, shows funders their investment is producing results, and contributes evidence to the broader field. We build evaluations, data systems, and proposals that work this way, because we've seen again and again that programs treated as black boxes underperform the programs treated as learning systems.

We also believe teachers, program coordinators, and principals are perfectly capable of reading and using data — given instruments designed around their reality and training delivered in their language. Every tool we build and every workshop we run is shaped by that conviction.

What sets us apart

Most evaluation firms do not have technical skills in-house. When a project calls for a complex online survey, a custom database, a real dashboard, or a non-trivial data analysis, the firm either skips that work, does it superficially, or hands it off to a contractor who has no context on the program. The coordination tax shows up in the final product: research questions that couldn't be operationalized, surveys that didn't measure what the evaluator intended, and deadlines that slipped because two vendors had to align.

Edstar's senior consultants are PhDs in education who also design the survey, clean the dataset, build the dashboard, and write the code behind it. Nothing important on a project is handed to someone who doesn't know the program. That combination — subject-matter depth and the technical skill to execute on it, in the same person, on the same project — is rarer than it sounds. A recurring source of new work for us is clients who hired a more traditional evaluator first, hit the operational wall, and came to us to finish.

There's a cultural reason the combination is uncommon. In education, the person who reasons abstractly has long been treated as higher status than the person who builds, tests, and ships. We've spent three decades watching the programs that actually succeed — and they are almost always run by people who do both. We built Edstar around the same conviction. (More on this in The doing gap in educational evaluation.)

In memory of Dr. Lee V. Stiff

Edstar's co-founder, Dr. Lee V. Stiff, was a national leader in mathematics education — past president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, a longtime professor at NC State, and a mentor to generations of teachers and researchers. His commitment to mathematics teaching that respects both rigor and the lived experience of students remains central to Edstar's work.