Nicholas R. Chitwood, Ed.D.

I came to education data through an unlikely path. I started my career as a band director — years in the classroom before moving into educational compliance and eventually data administration. That transition wasn’t a pivot so much as following the thread: the same part of my brain that tried to force a bunch of high schoolers to stand in neatly spaced straight lines turned out to be pretty good at optimizing data systems. I pursued an Ed.D. in Education Leadership and Policy at UCLA, with additional doctoral coursework at UC Riverside in school finance, policy analysis, and advanced statistics.

Today I work at the Riverside County Office of Education, where I manage data infrastructure and accountability reporting across 23 school districts serving about 420,000 students. I build automated accountability reports that are available to every LEA in California, maintain public Tableau dashboards that inform district decision-making, and navigate data sharing partnerships with other state agencies and higher education institutions, such as the CSU system and the State Treasurer’s Office through CalKIDS. The stack runs on Python, R, SQL, Kubernetes, Airflow, dbt, Tableau, and Shiny — but the real work begins once data is in the hands of educators. Too often, we don’t even get to that point — and that’s where we come in. Providing timely, actionable data so that the experts in classrooms can do what they do best.

I was named RCOE’s 2024 Classified Administrator of the Year. When I’m not wrangling data pipelines or debugging container orchestration, I’m usually at a conference somewhere making the case that public education agencies can modernize their data infrastructure without losing sight of the students at the center of every dataset.