School Finder

How the School Finder works

Each filter maps directly to a field in the federal record, so a search is a precise query against the NCES Common Core of Data rather than an opinion ranking. Three things are worth knowing before you read the results:

• Student-teacher ratio is enrollment divided by full-time-equivalent teachers, a staffing- intensity measure, not a direct count of students per classroom (it includes specialists and pull-out staff). The national median runs around 15 to 16 students per teacher, so a 12:1 filter surfaces the more generously staffed end of the distribution and a 25:1 filter is closer to the typical urban high school.
• Free-lunch share is the proportion of students whose household income qualifies them for free meals, the standard proxy for economic need that federal Title I funding tracks; the national figure is near half of all public-school students, so a 75%-plus band isolates high-need campuses.
• School type (charter, magnet, Title I) comes straight from the federal classification, not an editorial label.

The finder searches only schools that report staff data to NCES, so closed or stub listings are excluded, and it returns the largest matching schools first. A match is a starting point rather than a verdict: these figures describe the resources a school reports, not test scores or academic outcomes. Open any profile for the full context, and see our methodology for how every field is sourced, computed, and dated.