School Research Guides
Plain-language guides to help families, researchers, and educators understand U.S. school data, navigate school choice, and interpret education statistics — drawn directly from federal NCES and CRDC surveys, without editorial opinion or proprietary scoring.
How to Choose a School District: A Data-Driven Guide
Key metrics that matter when evaluating school districts, student-teacher ratios, graduation rates, enrollment trends, and what the numbers don't tell you.
Understanding NCES School Data: What the Numbers Mean
A primer on the National Center for Education Statistics, what data they collect, how to read key metrics, and where the data has limitations.
Magnet vs Charter vs Traditional Public Schools
The real differences between magnet, charter, and traditional public schools, governance, admissions, funding, and how to evaluate each type.
How Schools Are Funded: Title I, Federal, State, and Local Sources
A clear explanation of where school money comes from, federal programs like Title I, state formulas, and local property taxes.
Understanding School Discipline Data: CRDC Reports Explained
How to read Civil Rights Data Collection discipline reports, suspensions, expulsions, and what discipline data tells you about school climate.
Chronic Absenteeism: What It Is, Why It Matters, and What the Data Shows
How chronic absenteeism is defined, why it doubled during COVID, which students are most at risk, and what research says about effective interventions.
How to Read School Test Scores: A Parent's Guide
What NCES test score data actually measures, why cross-state comparisons mislead, and which school quality metrics matter beyond test results.
What Chronic Absenteeism Means for Your School
How to use the PlainSchools absenteeism tracker, what the severity levels mean, and why this metric predicts outcomes better than test scores.
Public vs Private Schools by the Numbers
NCES data comparison of enrollment, class sizes, teacher qualifications, demographics, and spending between public and private schools.
What do these guides cover?
PlainSchools guides are written to help families, educators, and researchers understand the data behind U.S. public schools. Each guide breaks down a single topic, funding, test scores, demographics, discipline, or absenteeism, in plain language, explaining what the numbers mean, how they are measured, and the common mistakes people make when interpreting them. All information is sourced from official government data, including the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), the U.S. Department of Education, and the Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC). Use our school search, district pages, and state summaries to look up data for your area.
Guide Methodology
Every guide is built from primary federal sources, NCES Common Core of Data (CCD) 2024-25, the Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC) 2021-22, and the NCES F-33 School District Finance Survey. We cite the specific table or survey used for each statistic and link to the original agency release so readers can verify every figure.
Plain-language explanations are reviewed against the source definitions published by NCES and the U.S. Department of Education. Where researchers disagree (for example, on how to interpret chronic absenteeism thresholds or how to compare magnet vs. charter school outcomes), we present the contested ranges rather than picking a single number. Data-point claims are always paired with a year, a level of geography (school, district, state, national), and a link into the PlainSchools database so the figure can be independently inspected.
Read our full site methodology for details on ETL, quality-grade computation, and data-cleaning rules.