PlainSchools Directory
The full directory of entities tracked by PlainSchools — navigate by entity type, then drill into individual records. Every listing links to a data-backed profile with enrollment, funding, and Civil Rights Data Collection statistics.
Directory by Entity Type
Directory by Ranking
Directory of Reference Pages
Directory Coverage & Methodology
The PlainSchools directory indexes every active U.S. public elementary and secondary school reported to the federal government. The authoritative roster is the NCES Common Core of Data (CCD) 2024-25, which includes approximately 98,000 public schools across roughly 13,000 school districts in all 50 states, Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, and the outlying areas. We restrict the directory to U.S. states and D.C. to keep cross-state comparisons coherent.
Inclusion thresholds are strict and deliberate. A city is indexed only when at least five active schools share its Census place name + state pair. A district is included only when it reports non-zero enrollment in the most recent membership file. A school is listed only when it has a valid NCES ID and a non-closed operational status flag. Closed, inactive, and suppressed entities are reachable by direct NCES ID URL but do not appear in browse, ranking, or directory listings.
Financial statistics come from the NCES F-33 School District Finance Survey, discipline and absenteeism from the Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC) 2021-22, and up-to-date enrollment from NCES School Membership 2024-25. Every figure on every detail page links back to the upstream release. Read the full PlainSchools methodology for ETL rules, computation formulas, and data-cleaning procedures.