Atlanta’s Standard Education Uses Data To Help More Students Graduate

ATLANTA, September 8 (Hypepotamus) - TJ Muehleman and Jason Elgin know they have a pretty cool job. 

“Helping kids graduate from high school is pretty awesome,” as Muehleman put it. 

The two are behind Standard Education, a bootstrapped data platform helping school districts with some of their most pressing problems, including graduation rate, chronic absenteeism, and funding problems. And from their HQ in Atlanta, they are seeing some impressive traction in rural school districts across the country.

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Key Takeaways

• Atlanta-based Standard Education helps K-12 districts turn scattered student data into actionable insights.
• Its platform tracks graduation risk, absenteeism, academic performance, and other student-success indicators, updating every 24 hours.
• High schools in Houston County, Georgia report graduation rate increasing from 87% to 92% after adopting the platform.
• The bootstrapped company is gaining traction with rural districts that often have limited budgets and staff.

Inside Standard Education’s Mission And Platform 

Standard Education sells directly into the administrative offices for K-12 districts. 

This helps bridge a critical gap in the educational system, says the team. 

There are a lot of EdTechs focused on students and curriculum development. “But there’s not a lot of focus on helping out district offices. They have tons of data, but it’s spread out everywhere. And not everyone has access to it. And a lot of folks aren’t doing a lot with [that data],” Elgin explained to Hypepotamus. “That’s even more true in rural districts,” which he said “have the same big problems with a much smaller budget and a lot less staff.” 

The platform pulls in data across attendance, demographics, assessments, and other important data to track student success. It then goes into Standard Education’s cohort tracker, which updates every 24 hours. 

This means that school districts aren’t waiting for information about struggling students (which often gets to teachers and administrators when it is too late to fix the problem). 

The startup’s charter — and currently largest — customer is Houston County, located in Central Georgia. The team said that its platform helped raise the county’s graduation rate from 87% to 92% over the 2024/2025 school year. They started using Standard Education in the summer of 2023, and were notified that 200 kids were at risk of not meeting graduation requirements. That data helped get teachers and administrators tangible next steps to help individual students with the most up-to-date information. And those increased graduation stats could mean huge implications for people down the road in terms of earning potential and overall opportunities.  

Standard Education’s platform is already deployed in schools outside of Georgia as well. The team reports that several districts in Kansas are using the platform to identify and aid students dealing with  loneliness, behavior issues, and absenteeism, and one in Washington State is using it to track the behavior metrics of over 6,000 students. 

Ultimately, the data platform is looking to serve the “the whole child,” Elgin added. “All these disparate data points paint a different picture than they do individually.” 

Meet The Team 

If Standard and Muehleman’s names sound familiar…it probably means you’ve been reading Hype for a long time (thanks for that, BTW). 

Standard Co has been around for 15 years, mostly with a focus providing data platforms to public health organizations. But the company expanded into education three years ago, with that part of the business “growing faster” than TJ anticipated.  

Muehleman tapped Elgin to lead up the Education part of the company. 

Elgin previously worked at 352 and Fullstory, where he was the Senior Product Designer of Growth for the analytics company also headquartered in Atlanta. 

Muehleman said this was a time when “LinkedIn actually worked.” The two had been connected socially for years, but reconnected online when Muehleman say that Elgin was looking at EdTech opportunities. 

The team said they are intentionally not taking venture capital (and openly shunning it) so that they can focus on being a mission-driven tech company. 

The Standard Education teams’ ask? Tell your friends and family about them…especially if they live in rural areas. 

Featured photo: Redd Francisco / Unsplash