Where PlainSchools' numbers come from
Each school and district keeps a file here, and every line in it is copied from a return the school system sent to Washington: the fall count to the Common Core of Data, the finance survey, the civil-rights collection and the attendance report, plus the Census Bureau's district maps for the address finder. Every line says which return and which year. We work out ratios and shares from the counts on those returns, and we do not grade schools.
Sources
| Source | Files | What we use |
|---|---|---|
| NCES Common Core of Data, 2024-25 | Directory, membership, staff, lunch and school characteristics files | Enrollment, level, grades offered, teachers, free and reduced-price lunch counts, website, phone, charter and virtual status, free-meal program |
| NCES Common Core of Data, 2022-23 and 2023-24 | Membership, staff and lunch files | Three-year enrollment and teacher trend; teachers where a state did not report for 2024-25 |
| NCES Common Core of Data, 2021-22 | School characteristics file | Title I status (the last year NCES published it) |
| Civil Rights Data Collection, 2021-22 | School-level files | AP courses, gifted programs, counselors and enrollment, discipline |
| EDFacts, 2022-23 | Chronic absenteeism by school | Chronic absenteeism |
| NCES F-33, fiscal year 2022-23 | School district finance survey | Spending per student, revenue by source, instruction spending, fall 2022 district membership |
| U.S. Census Bureau, Annual Survey of School System Finances, fiscal year 2023-24 | Summary table 20 and the school system files for 2022-23 and 2023-24 | Per pupil current spending by state, 2018-19 to 2023-24 (the per-pupil study), and each district's 2023-24 figure with its change on the year before |
| NCES Common Core of Data, local education agency directory 2024-25 | District directory file | District website, phone and office address |
| NCES Digest of Education Statistics 2023, table 208.40 | Pupil/teacher ratios by state | The five-year line on the student-teacher ratio study (fall 2018 to fall 2022) |
| U.S. Census Bureau, Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates 2024 | School district estimates | Children aged 5 to 17 and those in families in poverty, per district (a model-based estimate for residents, not enrollment) |
| District home pages | The name on each district's own website | The name a district uses for itself, shown first when it differs from the NCES name, with the NCES name beside it |
| U.S. Census Bureau geocoder | TIGER unified, elementary and secondary school districts, current vintage | The district whose boundary contains an address (district finder) |
What we derive
- Students per teacherEnrollment over full-time-equivalent teachers in the same school year; values under 3 or of 100 or more are treated as reporting errors and not shown
- Free-meal shareStudents eligible for free meals over enrollment, same year
- Counselor ratioCRDC 2021-22 enrollment over CRDC 2021-22 counselor FTE, the same collection
- Spending per studentF-33 current spending for elementary and secondary education over fall membership; state and U.S. figures sum every reporting district
- School levelThe 2024-25 directory's level; secondary (grades 7 to 12) schools count as high
- Chronic absenteeismEDFacts 2022-23: a school's chronically absent students over its fall 2022 membership; a count at or above membership is left out, never shown as 100%
- Display namesAll-capital names are shown in title case; the official name stays on the record
Coverage notes
- School records, and the national and state figures built from them, are the 94,177 schools that reported fall 2024 membership. The 2024-25 directory lists 99,073 operating schools in the 50 states and D.C.; the others are programs and schools that reported no students, and pages that say how many public schools exist give the directory count. 1,714 older records (closed or not in that directory) keep their pages with their last year named.
- New York City files its finances as one unit for its 32 geographic districts; spending figures use that unit.
- State-run schools (for example schools for the deaf and blind) are listed under the state agency that runs them.
- Where a state reported no 2024-25 teacher counts, its schools show the latest year that was reported, with the year named.
Resource index
The resource index (2024-25 × 2021-22) averages up to four factors, each scored from 0 to 100, over the factors a school reports. Lists ranked by it need at least three of the four. It measures staffing, counseling, programs and attendance; it does not measure teaching or learning.
- Students per teacher (CCD 2024-25)100 at 0, falling to 0 at 25 or more
- Students per counselor (CRDC 2021-22)100 at 0, falling to 0 at 500 or more
- Gifted program (CRDC 2021-22)70 if offered, 30 if not
- Chronic absenteeism (EDFacts 2022-23)100 at 0%, falling to 0 at 40% or more
Equity and diversity measures
- State funding equity: what a district at the 90th percentile of spending per student spends over one at the 10th, among the state's districts with 1,000 or more students.
- District equity score: four percentiles of 25 points each (spending, spending adjusted for the free-meal share, low reliance on local revenue, fewer students per teacher), comparing districts within the group named on the page.
- Diversity index: one minus the sum of squared shares of students in the seven NCES race and ethnicity groups, times 100: the chance, in percent, that two students picked at random differ.
How a release is loaded and checked
- Each federal file is downloaded from its publisher and kept unchanged; the load scripts read it as published and record which file and year each value came from.
- Schools are joined to their districts by the NCES district ID (the first seven digits of the school ID), and districts to their F-33 finance rows by the same ID.
- Before any page changes, the totals are checked against the file itself (schools, students and districts per state) and against the previous year.
- Values a file marks as missing, suppressed or not applicable stay missing: a page says "not reported" rather than showing zero.
- Ratios and shares are computed from counts of the same year and, where one file holds both, the same file; the one cross-file figure, teacher salary spending per full-time teacher (F-33 salary lines over the CCD district staff count, both 2022-23), says so wherever it appears. A figure from an older year keeps its year on the page.
- Each load step is versioned in the database with its date, and the database is backed up before each change so any release can be rolled back.
Who reviews the pages, and when: before each release, three figures on every page type (school, district, city and state pages, the lists, rankings and research) are checked against the NCES, CRDC and F-33 files they cite, and the pages are read in separate review passes against Google's and Bing's published quality guidelines, for claims a school, a district or a parent could dispute, and for any figure that reads differently on two pages. The studio runs these checks with AI tools and records each one; the last full review was for the release of October 6, 2026. A school or district with too few federal figures for a page of its own is summarized on its district page or its state's district list, with what NCES reports for it.
The Common Core of Data is published once a year with later revisions, the Civil Rights Data Collection every two years, and the F-33 finance survey about two years after the school year it covers. PlainSchools loads each new release when it appears; the year on each figure says which release it is.
What we do not do
- We do not rate or grade schools; rankings name the one measure they sort by.
- We do not have test scores or graduation rates.
- We do not assign homes to schools; the district finder names the district only, and districts set attendance zones.
- Private schools are not covered; the Common Core of Data covers public schools.
Updates and corrections
NCES publishes each Common Core of Data year once, with revisions; we load a new release by a documented script, check its totals against the file and the previous year, and name the year on every page. If a figure looks wrong, tell us the page, the figure and the official source; we check it against the federal file and log material fixes on the changelog. Upstream revisions arrive with the next release.
Every school record shows its 12-digit NCES ID; enter it in the NCES school search to compare the federal record with ours.
PlainSchools is not affiliated with the U.S. Department of Education, NCES or any government agency.
Sources
Download the compiled NCES state extract: plainschools-state-summary.csv (same extract as /statistics).