Editorial & Corrections Policy

PlainSchools publishes profiles for every public school and school district in the United States, built entirely from official U.S. Department of Education data. This page explains how those pages are produced, what standards they are held to, and how to report a number that looks wrong so we can fix it at the source.

How these pages are produced

Every figure on PlainSchools originates in a public federal dataset. We download the raw National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) files, load them through a documented, version-controlled data pipeline, and render them into school and district profiles using shared templates. No profile is hand-written, and no number is typed in by an editor. Each value you see is read directly from the official source record at build time.

Our editorial team is responsible for the parts a pipeline cannot decide on its own: which datasets to use, how each metric is defined and labeled, what the methodology says, which derived measures (such as our Resource Investment Index) are computed and how, and what we will not publish. The pipeline then applies those decisions uniformly across the whole country, so the rule that governs one school governs all of them.

Sourcing standards

We publish only data that comes from official government sources, and we name the source on every page. Our datasets are:

  • NCES Common Core of Data (CCD): enrollment, demographics, staffing, student-teacher ratios, and school characteristics, from the 2024-25 collection.
  • NCES F-33 District Finance Survey: per-pupil expenditure and revenue by source, from the most recent released fiscal year (FY 2021-22).
  • Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC): counselor access, gifted programs, and chronic absenteeism, from the 2021-22 collection.

We do not scrape third-party sites, we do not republish parent reviews or proprietary rating algorithms, and we do not generate any school data ourselves. Where a figure is derived from the official data (for example, a percentile or a composite index), the page links to our methodology, which sets out exactly how it is calculated.

Accuracy and validation

Because the data is read straight from federal files, the most common source of error is the upstream record itself: CCD figures are self-reported by states and districts, and reporting gaps and coding quirks do occur. Our pipeline applies systematic checks before a value is published. It screens out implausible outliers, flags figures that fail a sanity range (for example, a per-pupil expenditure far outside the national distribution, which usually indicates a service agency rather than an operating district), and shows a value as unavailable rather than guessing when the source suppresses or omits it.

When we find that a displayed number is wrong, we fix the cause, not the symptom. We trace the value back to the data layer, correct the derivation or screening rule there, and regenerate the affected pages, so the same class of error is resolved everywhere at once rather than patched on a single page.

Editorial independence

PlainSchools does not accept payment, sponsorship, or promoted placement from schools, districts, states, or education companies. Our only revenue source is contextual display advertising served by Google AdSense. Advertisers have no influence over which schools we cover, how they rank, or how their data is presented, and they receive no preferential placement. We publish no subjective ratings and take no editorial position on whether a given school is good or bad; we present the official data and let families weigh what matters to them.

Update schedule

NCES releases updated CCD data annually, typically in late fall, and the F-33 finance survey follows on its own slower schedule. We refresh our database within weeks of each new federal release and re-stamp the affected pages so the published date reflects when the content genuinely changed. The data vintage in effect is named on every data page and in our methodology.

Corrections process

If a figure looks wrong, please tell us. We treat data-error reports as a priority and follow the same process every time:

  1. Report. Email hello@plainschools.com with the page URL and the figure you are questioning.
  2. Verify. We check the value against the official NCES source record for that school or district.
  3. Fix at the source. If the figure is wrong on our side, we correct the underlying data or derivation rule and regenerate every page it affects.
  4. Note it. If the figure is correct but reflects a known upstream reporting quirk, we explain the caveat rather than silently changing it.

Some apparent errors trace back to the federal source itself. When that is the case, we will tell you so and, where possible, point you to the official NCES record so you can verify it directly.

Contact

Questions about our standards, methodology, or a specific figure are welcome at hello@plainschools.com. For more on what the data covers and how it is processed, see our About page and methodology.