Skip to content
American Factbook
Menu

How the schools figures are made

How the pages of the Schools hub read what their publishers put out, and what that record can and cannot say. The method every topic shares — where a figure comes from, snapshots, freshness and corrections — is on the site’s methodology page.

Three files, three years

Schools, districts, pupils and teachers come from NCES’s Common Core of Data for 2024–25. Revenue and spending come from its School District Finance Survey, whose newest file is fiscal year 2023, three school years older, and provisional. Colleges come from IPEDS, whose surveys each have their own collection year. Every figure names its year, and no figure divides one file by another.

Spending per pupil is NCES’s division

It is current spending over fall membership, each summed over every district first: the figure NCES publishes for every state, which this site reproduces to the dollar — $16,398 nationally in fiscal year 2023. Current spending leaves out buildings, equipment and debt. A district that pays another district to teach its pupils counts that tuition as its own spending.

A ratio is over the schools that report both sides

Pupils per teacher divides the pupils of the schools that report teachers by those schools’ teachers, in full-time equivalents: 92,705 of 99,073 schools in 2024–25. A state that reports no teachers has no ratio rather than a ratio of zero, and is named wherever the ratio is printed.

The trends, and what they leave out

Enrollment over time is each state’s own total from NCES’s state files, every fall from 2014–15, the first year of the files in their current form. It matches the Digest of Education Statistics for every state and year except where a state did not report its pre-kindergarten pupils; there NCES’s published figure adds an estimate and this one does not. Because which states report pre-K changes from year to year, each trend states its finding for enrollment excluding pre-kindergarten, and draws both lines.

Spending per pupil over time is the district finance survey for every fiscal year from 2005, divided the same way as above. It is in each year’s dollars and is not adjusted for inflation. Each year is the release NCES has published for it, provisional or final. Earlier years are left out because their files write a missing figure and a true zero the same way.

Districts as NCES counts them

New York City’s public schools are filed as 33 geographic districts under one supervisory office, and NCES counts the city as one district. So does this site: the city’s pupils, schools and teachers are summed into one row wherever districts are ranked or counted, which makes 19,183 districts in the fifty states and DC.

A school or district counts when NCES lists it as open, new, added, changed or reopened. Closed, inactive and future ones are in the files and not in the counts.

What this data cannot show

  • Every figure is NCES's, for the year it names. School and district counts are for the 2024–25 school year; spending and revenue are for fiscal year 2023, NCES's newest finance file, which is provisional; college figures are IPEDS's own collection years.
  • Pupils per teacher is over the schools that report both counts. Tennessee reported no teachers for 2024–25, so it has no ratio, and the national figure leaves it out.
  • Eligibility for free or reduced-price lunch is not a poverty rate. Schools that feed every pupil under the Community Eligibility Provision may report every pupil or none as eligible, and some states report no counts at all.
  • Spending per pupil is current spending over fall membership, summed over every district, as NCES divides. It leaves out capital outlay and debt, and a district that sends its pupils to another district pays tuition that counts as its own spending.
  • A school is operational when NCES lists it as open, new, added, changed or reopened. Closed, inactive and future schools are in the files and not in these counts.
  • There are no test scores here. None of these files carries them, and state assessment results are a separate collection this hub has not loaded.
  • There is no magnet status. NCES stopped publishing it after 2019–20, and a school page carries only the fields of the file it is built from, so an older value is not printed as current. Charter status is published, and is on every school page.

Sources

Data retrieved