Browse PlainSchools

Every public school and district in the United States, indexed by name, state, city, and program type — straight from federal NCES and CRDC surveys, without proprietary ratings or editorial formulas. Jump into any dataset below to explore enrollment, student-teacher ratios, funding, and discipline records.

Browse All Schools (A–Z)

Alphabetical index of every public K–12 school with enrollment and type.

Browse Districts

School districts ranked by enrollment, per-pupil spending, and equity score.

Browse by State

State-level summaries of public schools, funding, and absenteeism.

Browse by City

Public school rosters for every U.S. city in the NCES dataset.

Rankings & Leaderboards

Best schools, largest districts, highest spending, funding equity, and more.

Compare Tool

Side-by-side comparisons for any two schools or districts in the country.

All 50 states — direct entry

Click any state to see all schools, districts, demographics, and funding statistics from the NCES Common Core of Data universe.

Alabama AL Alaska AK Arizona AZ Arkansas AR California CA Colorado CO Connecticut CT Delaware DE District of Columbia DC Florida FL Georgia GA Hawaii HI

What You Can Find in the Browse Index

The browse index gives you four orthogonal entry points into the same underlying database. The alphabetical school browser is best when you remember a school name but not its location. The district browser is best when you care about funding, per-pupil spending, or governance — district-level decisions drive most of the variation in classroom resources. The state and city browsers organize schools by geography, useful for comparing local options or studying regional patterns in enrollment, demographic composition, or chronic absenteeism. The rankings page reorders the same universe by quantitative measures: enrollment, funding-equity score, spending per pupil, and absenteeism rate. The compare tool lets you place any two schools (or districts) side by side across the metrics that matter most to you.

Every page is built from federal sources — primarily NCES Common Core of Data (CCD), the F-33 School District Finance Survey, and the Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC). We do not editorialize, score, or rank schools by subjective quality measures: every number on the page traces to a federal data table you can verify directly with the source agency. Pages are refreshed when NCES publishes the next universe file (typically annually, with a one-to-two-year lag between school year and release).

How the Browse Index Is Built

Every entity listed in the browse index is sourced from NCES Common Core of Data (CCD) 2022-23 — the federal census of public elementary and secondary schools. School names, grade spans, charter and magnet flags, and enrollment come from the school-level universe file. District-level figures (per-pupil expenditure, revenue mix) come from the NCES F-33 School District Finance Survey. Discipline, absenteeism, and program data come from the Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC) 2021-22.

Cities are derived by normalizing school addresses: we group all active schools sharing a U.S. Census place name + state pair, then require at least five schools before a city is indexed (to avoid thin, low-signal pages). Alphabetical listings use NCES school_name after light normalization (trim, title-case, collapse whitespace). Closed and inactive schools are excluded from browse listings but remain addressable via their NCES ID.

For a complete accounting of upstream tables, computation formulas, and the quality-grade rubric, see the PlainSchools methodology page.