How Proficiency and Graduation Rates Are Measured: EDFacts
EDFacts is the federal collection behind state test proficiency rates and cohort graduation rates. Here is what those measures actually count — and why this launch does not publish proficiency rates.
EDFacts is the US Department of Education’s warehouse for state-submitted K–12 data, including the statewide assessment results every state administers under federal law. For academics, the core files are FS175 (mathematics) and FS178 (reading/language arts): for each state, district and school, they report how many students scored at or above the state’s “proficient” level, by grade and student group. A proficiency rate is therefore a share of tested students meeting a state-defined standard — and because each state sets its own tests and cut scores, a 40% proficiency rate in one state is not the same achievement level as 40% in another. Cross-state proficiency comparisons must be made with that warning attached, always.
Participation and suppression
EDFacts also collects participation (FS002 and related files): federal law expects at least 95% of students to test, and a proficiency rate computed over a self-selected subset of test-takers can mislead. Small groups are suppressed or range-reported (for example “≤20%”) to protect student privacy, which is why school-level files contain symbols and ranges rather than clean percentages for many subgroups. Any republication that converts those ranges into point estimates is inventing precision the source deliberately withheld.
The cohort graduation rate (ACGR)
The four-year adjusted cohort graduation rate (FS150/FS151) tracks first-time ninth-graders, adjusts the cohort for transfers in and out, and reports the share earning a regular diploma within four years. It is a modeled rate built over five years of records — fundamentally different from a completers count, which simply totals diplomas awarded in one year. This site publishes diploma counts from the CCD Completers file, labeled as counts, and does not relabel them as graduation rates.
Why this launch publishes no proficiency rates
During production of this site, the EDFacts/ED Data Express download for the assessment files could not be retrieved and verified from our build environment, and the rates are exactly the kind of figure that must be checked cell-by-cell against the source file before publication. Rather than fill the gap with figures copied from secondary summaries — which routinely blend years, grades and student groups — we left proficiency out of this launch, documented the omission here and in the site manifest, and designed the district pages so verified EDFacts rates can be added file-by-file later with their school year attached. A documented gap is a defect we can fix; an unverified number is a defect readers cannot see.
Related reading: how NCES collects CCD data and the methodology index.
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.