Editorial & Corrections Policy

PlainSchools answers questions parents, teachers and reporters ask about a public school or school district: how many students it has, how many teachers, what the district spends, where its money comes from. This page says which federal files those answers come from, who checks them, and what happens when you find one that is wrong.

How a school or district page is made

A school page and a district page are records: code reads the federal files for that school or district and lays the figures out the same way for all of them, so a number on one page means the same thing on every other. Guides and research summaries are drafted with AI writing tools; every number in them is computed from the same database the records use and checked against it before the page goes live. The PlainSchools data editor decides which files are loaded, how each measure is defined, which comparisons the pages draw (a district against the other districts of its state, a school against schools of the same level), and what is left out.

The files behind the figures

• NCES Common Core of Data, 2024-25: each school's enrollment, grades, teachers, lunch program and directory entry, and each district's schools.
• NCES F-33 school district finance survey, fiscal year 2022-23: current spending per student, instruction spending and revenue by source (state, local, federal).
• NCES Common Core of Data, 2021-22 school characteristics: Title I status, the last year NCES published it.
• Civil Rights Data Collection, 2021-22: Advanced Placement courses, gifted programs, counselors and discipline.
• EDFacts, 2022-23: chronic absenteeism rates by school.

Each page names the file and year under the figure it supports. Nothing comes from parent reviews, private rating services or other websites. Percentiles, medians and rankings are computed by PlainSchools from these files; the methodology gives each formula and the rows it covers.

What gets checked before a figure is shown

States and districts report these numbers to Washington themselves, so the usual error is in the report, not in the copying. Before publishing, the pipeline drops ratios outside 3 to 99 students per teacher, keeps a school's figures only for years in which the school was open, reads a district's spending only when the F-33 file gives it a fall enrollment, and shows "not reported" when a file leaves a value out instead of estimating one.

When a figure turns out to be wrong, the fix goes into the step that produced it, and every page built from that step is rebuilt, so one report can correct thousands of pages at once.

Money and independence

No school, district, state agency or education company pays PlainSchools, and none can buy a place on a list or a change in how its numbers read. The site earns from display advertising served by Journey by Mediavine; advertisers do not see the data before it is published and have no say in it. PlainSchools does not grade schools as good or bad.

When the data changes

NCES publishes each Common Core of Data school year and, on a slower schedule, each F-33 finance year. PlainSchools loads each release after it appears and changes a page's stated data year only when its figures actually change.

Reporting a wrong number

1. Send the page and the figure to hello@plainschools.com, with the value you believe is right and where you saw it.
2. We compare it with the federal record for that school or district in the NCES school and district search.
3. If our copy or our calculation is wrong, we correct the step that produced it and rebuild the affected pages, then reply with what changed.
4. If the federal record itself says so, we reply with a link to that record and explain the caveat.

Questions

Write to hello@plainschools.com about a figure, a definition or a school that seems to be missing. The about page says who runs PlainSchools; the methodology gives every formula.