About Public School Stats
Public School Stats is an independent reference site that republishes United States federal school statistics — clearly labeled, year by year — for parents, journalists, researchers and taxpayers.
What we do
We take the public files of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) — principally the Common Core of Data (CCD) — and EDFacts, and turn them into readable pages about the largest school districts, every covered state, and the largest schools in major cities. Each page answers a small set of questions with the government’s own numbers: How many students? How many schools? How many teachers per student? How many students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch? How many diplomas were awarded? What was spent per pupil? We add context about what each measure means and where it can mislead, because a bare table invites exactly the misreadings our methodology pages warn against.
Our Editorial Team
Public School Stats is produced by the Public School Stats Editorial Team, a small group of data editors who work directly from federal source files. The team’s standing rules: figures are extracted programmatically from the published NCES and EDFacts files (never typed from secondary summaries), every figure carries its school or fiscal year, computed ratios use fields from the same file and year only, unreported items are shown as “not reported,” and any measure we cannot verify against its source file is omitted and the omission documented. Corrections are made in the open: if a source file is revised, the affected pages are regenerated from the revised file and the update date on the page changes.
Methodology
Our primary sources are the NCES Common Core of Data — the Directory, Membership, Staff, Lunch Program and Completers files of the Public Elementary/Secondary Universe Survey for the 2023–24 school year, the School District Finance Survey (F-33) for fiscal year 2024, and the National Public Education Financial Survey (NPEFS) for fiscal year 2024 — together with EDFacts, the Department of Education’s K–12 data warehouse, whose assessment and graduation files our methodology pages describe. Federal school data are staggered by design: universe and membership files describe the 2023–24 school year, finance files describe fiscal year 2024 (the same school year through the finance pipeline, published later), and EDFacts assessment files follow their own release schedule. We never blend years silently; the stagger is explained in full on our data years page, and every figure on this site is labeled with its own year. The full method set is in the methodology index.
What we are not
We are not a school-rating site and we do not rank schools by quality: the federal files measure size, staffing, economics and spending, not teaching quality, and we will not dress inputs up as verdicts. We are not affiliated with NCES, the Department of Education, or any district whose statistics we republish, and republication does not imply endorsement by any of them. For an official figure, the NCES file named in each page’s source line is the authority.
Questions or corrections: use the contact page. Please include the page address and the figure in question so we can trace it to its source row.
Data: National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) Common Core of Data and EDFacts, retrieved October 2026, from nces.ed.gov. Enrollment, staffing and lunch figures are for the 2023–24 school year; finance figures are fiscal year 2024 (school year 2023–24) unless a page labels them otherwise.
Disclaimer: Public School Stats republishes official federal statistics for general information only. Figures are reported as published by NCES and EDFacts and may include imputed or revised values; for decisions affecting a specific school or district, confirm the figure with the district or the NCES source file. See our full Disclaimer.