Data Sources

School names, addresses, enrollment counts, grade ranges, student-teacher ratios, and demographic breakdowns come from theNCES 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 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).

Neighborhood statistics (median income, home values, education levels, commute times, poverty rates) come from theU.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.

Athletics, advanced STEM courses, and gifted and talented indicators come from theCivil 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 theUrban Institute Education Data Portal. AP/IB rows can come from CRDC, NCES EdFacts, or both; school pages show the row's recorded source.

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.

Our 1-10 composite ratings are calculated by MySchoolScout using the data sources above. The formula blends student growth, poverty-adjusted academic performance, and learning environment — plus college readiness for high schools — with weights that vary by school level. Equity data is shown for context but is not part of the composite. Rankings are computed within each state to ensure fair comparison across different state assessments.

For full details on how ratings are calculated, see ourMethodology page.

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.

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.