On a Monday morning, a seventh-grade science teacher opens her laptop. She pulls up her learning management system (LMS) to make sure the day's assignment is ready, and switches to the district's assessment platform to see who needs to make up last week's quiz. Then, she opens another tab for the curriculum tool her department adopted in the fall, followed by a fourth tab to prep attendance. Each one requires a different login, and none of them shows the same student data.
She's not doing anything wrong. Her tools just don't know about each other.
Poor interoperability doesn’t show up in the classroom as a server error, but as small, daily hurdles to jump over. It eats into instruction or planning time and makes it harder for teachers to see the full picture of how students are doing.
The good news: interoperability isn't magic. It's a tool standard you can ask for, evaluate, and require.
What exactly does interoperability mean?
Interoperability means your tools share data without someone in the middle having to manually make it happen.
In practice, that means a student roster updated in your student information system (SIS) automatically updates in your LMS. It means a teacher can pass grades back from an assessment tool without exporting a spreadsheet. It means a student logs in once and gets where they need to go without another password or portal.
Single sign-on (SSO) is the part most people picture first, but it's only one piece. Full interoperability also covers rosters (syncing who's in which class), grade passback (sending results back to the gradebook), assignment sync (seeing work across platforms), and data portability (being able to move your data out when you need to).
Interoperability 101
- Learning tools interoperability (LTI) — the standard that lets external tools plug into an LMS and exchange data. LTI 1.3 is the current version; if a vendor is still on LTI 1.1, that's worth flagging.
- OneRoster — the standard for syncing rosters, grades, and course data between systems.
- Ed-Fi — a broader data framework used mostly at the state and district level to connect systems across the ecosystem.
- SAML/SSO — the authentication standard that handles secure single sign-on.
You should also know the term "platform agnostic." Vendors use it to mean their tool works with anything. Sometimes that's true, but sometimes it means they'll build a custom integration for your specific setup… that nobody else can maintain. That's more of a workaround than true interoperability.
What does poor interoperability actually cost?
A 2024 Clever survey of over 1,500 K–12 teachers found that 68% say their LMS doesn't integrate well with many or all of their applications. Time is lost manually entering data and checking multiple places to piece together a picture of student progress that should be automatic.
The less visible cost is what districts lose when data stays stuck in separate platforms. If curriculum, assessment, and LMS data are all separated, no one has a holistic view of how a student is doing. Teachers are forced to make instructional decisions on partial information.
Sometimes, an IT team member builds the workaround. They learn the quirks, maintain the custom sync, and fix it when something breaks. But when that person leaves, the workaround often goes with them, and whoever inherits it has to start from scratch.
Finally, there's an equity dimension worth naming. If some schools in your district have working integrations and others don't, students don't have equal access to the tools their district paid for. And when some tools are evidence-backed while others aren’t, that can create differences in student growth.
Most of this is preventable. The two most common culprits? Vendors who implement open standards inconsistently, and procurement processes that don’t ask the interoperability questions.
What does good integration look like?
Start with the standards. Before you sign a contract, ask vendors: Do you support LTI 1.3? OneRoster 2.0? What does roster sync look like in a district our size?
If your district runs a lot of tools, a rostering platform like Clever or an Ed-Fi implementation can act as one place to manage how your SIS talks to everything else. On the LMS side, look for an API-first architecture and a published integration catalog. Canvas by Instructure maintains an open ecosystem of LTI-certified partners, so districts can evaluate integration quality before purchasing a tool. The burden is on vendors to demonstrate interoperability.
In the next renewal and procurement cycle, treat interoperability as a requirement. If a tool is in classrooms and the integration is failing, you’ve lost time and leverage. Ask the questions before you sign, and make sure your IT team is in the room during the demo.
Start asking better questions
A well-integrated stack gives something back to everyone in the district. The IT team gets time back from fewer help tickets. Teachers get a cleaner daily experience and can focus more on instruction over technology barriers. Students get consistent access to their tools and fewer logins. And district leaders get a more complete picture of how those tools are actually performing.
That last part matters more than it might seem. If your systems don't talk to each other, your data doesn't either, and you're back to making renewal decisions based on login counts and vendor pitches instead of evidence.
Interoperability alone can’t fix a stack with too many tools. But it’s a lot easier to tell what's working and what isn't when your tools all speak the same language.
Curious what's actually getting used?
The EdTech Top 40 from LearnPlatform by Instructure ranks the most-accessed K-12 tools of the 2024-25 school year, drawn from 64 billion-plus interactions. It's a national benchmark for the same question this post asks about your own stack: what's working, and what's just installed?
