PlainSchools

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Data editor, PlainSchools

U.S. public school and district records from federal education files (NCES Common Core of Data, F-33 finance survey, Civil Rights Data Collection, EDFacts), with the file and year under every figure

Background

PlainSchools publishes a record for every U.S. public school that reports students and for every school district, built from the federal education files. Each page places its school or district among the others in its state, names the file and year under every figure, and links the NCES search where the record can be checked. The data editor role decides which files are loaded, how each measure is defined and compared, and what is left out; AI tools write the code, templates and explanatory text, and the numbers come from database queries. Corrections go to hello@plainschools.com.

How a PlainSchools record is built

Each school record starts from the NCES Common Core of Data directory for 2024-25 and adds the federal files that describe the same school: the Civil Rights Data Collection for counselors, advanced courses and discipline, EDFacts for chronic absenteeism and state test results, and the district's F-33 and Census Bureau finance reports for spending. The year of each file is printed under the figure it supplies.

Schools and districts are compared within their own state, because states set their own proficiency standards, count teachers their own way and book spending under their own rules.

What the numbers are not

A student-teacher ratio is not a class size, salary spending per teacher is not what a teacher is paid, and the resource index measures staffing, counseling, programs and attendance, not the quality of teaching. A test result is the share of the students tested who met their own state's standard, and ED publishes it as a range for smaller schools. A record describes a school; it does not rate it.

Feedback

A wrong or outdated figure is fixed in the file or query that produced it, so every page that uses it changes together; send the page address and what you found. Contact page · hello@plainschools.com

Areas of focus

  • k12 schools
  • school data
  • public dataset analysis

Contact and identity