Data Sources
Every data point on MySchoolScout comes from publicly available federal and state government sources. Here's exactly where our data comes from, how current it is, and how often we update.
Data on this page was last reviewed April 8, 2026. Current rankings were computed March 2026 from the NCES CCD 2022-23 release, state DOE releases (2023-24 where available), and U.S. Census ACS 5-year estimates (2019-2023).
See our changelog for recent updates to data, methodology, and features.
School Directory & Enrollment
School names, addresses, enrollment counts, grade ranges, student-teacher ratios, and demographic breakdowns come from the NCES Common Core of Data (CCD), the U.S. Department of Education's comprehensive annual directory of all public elementary and secondary schools and school districts.
Test Scores & Academic Performance
Test score data comes from two sources: state Departments of Education (higher quality, most recent year) and federal EdFacts data from NCES (multi-year historical data for growth calculations).
State Assessment Data (Primary Source)
We download school-level proficiency data directly from each state's Department of Education. Each state administers its own standardized assessment (e.g., CAASPP in California, STAAR in Texas, TCAP in Tennessee). We normalize these to a common format: percent of students scoring at or above proficient in Math and ELA.
EdFacts Historical Data (Growth Calculations)
For multi-year growth trends, we use EdFacts achievement data from 2019, 2021, and 2022. This federal data covers all states but has a longer publication lag.
Neighborhood Data
Neighborhood statistics (median income, home values, education levels, commute times, poverty rates) come from the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey (ACS), matched to each school's ZIP code.
This product uses the Census Bureau Data API but is not endorsed or certified by the Census Bureau.
Walkability & County Safety Index
We surface Walk Score, Transit Score, and Bike Score for individual school addresses, plus a county-level safety index derived from FBI UCR Part-1 offense counts normalized to per-100K-resident rates. Both signals appear on individual school pages in the Neighborhood Context section when data is available.
FERPA note: our crime index is reported strictly at the county level. We never store, query, or display per-school or per-student crime data.
Programs & Offerings
School program data (AP/IB courses, athletics, advanced STEM courses, gifted and talented programs) comes from the Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC), a biennial survey of all public schools conducted by the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights. We access this data through the Urban Institute Education Data Portal.
Programs data is shown on school pages as supplemental information. It is not factored into our composite scores or rankings. Private schools are not covered by CRDC, so athletics and advanced course data is only available for public schools.
Ratings & Rankings
Our 1-10 composite ratings are calculated by MySchoolScout using the data sources above. The formula weights Academic Performance (50%), Growth (20%), Equity (15%), and Environment (15%). Rankings are computed within each state to ensure fair comparison across different state assessments.
For full details on how ratings are calculated, see our Methodology page.
AI School Descriptions
A short narrative description on each school page is generated by a local large-language model (Qwen 2.5) from the same public data sources listed above. Descriptions summarize what the school offers — size, grade range, programs, test scores in context — without adding any information that isn't in the source data.
For schools with sparse data (fewer than 2 data components), we show a non-AI fallback description instead to avoid referencing misleading scores.
Public-Record Synthesis
Some school pages include a "What's said publicly" section synthesizing what a school says about itself and what independent sources record. We pull from the school's own website, its Wayback Machine snapshot (so we capture the page as a parent would have seen it last year), and Wikipedia when an article exists. Every claim is grounded in a cited source — we never include claims that don't appear in the underlying text.
Wikipedia content is licensed CC BY-SA 4.0; attribution is preserved via the inline source URL chip. Claims that fail the grounding check are pruned before render. Schools without a confident Wikipedia match are still synthesized using the remaining sources.
Data Limitations & Freshness
Government education data has inherent publication lags. The NCES CCD directory is typically released 12-18 months after the school year ends. State test score data is usually available within 3-6 months. Census ACS 5-year estimates are released about 12 months after the survey period.
This means some data on the site may be 1-2 years old. We show the data vintage on each school page so you always know exactly which school year the data represents. We update our data as soon as new releases become available.
Some data is suppressed to protect student privacy. When fewer than 10 students are in a group, state agencies suppress the data. This means small schools may have incomplete test score records.
Questions?
If you notice an error in our data or have questions about our sources, please contact us. We take data accuracy seriously and will investigate any reported discrepancies.