U.S. Public School District Boundaries and Administrative Attributes 2021-22

NCES's EDGE program provides annually updated composite files of public school district boundaries clipped to the U.S. shoreline, developed from the 2021-22 Common Core of Data collection. The dataset includes administrative characteristics such as directory information, student and teacher counts, and grade span, reported by state education officials.

Use Cases

• Analyze the relationship between district-level student counts and teacher counts to model resource allocation.
• Map school district boundaries from the composite files to study geographic access and district consolidation patterns.
• Investigate grade span data to understand the prevalence of unified versus elementary or secondary school districts.

Strengths

• Data is updated annually by the National Center for Education Statistics, a primary federal entity.
• Includes administrative attributes from the comprehensive Common Core of Data collection for all U.S. public school districts.
• Boundary files are specifically clipped to the U.S. shoreline for geographic accuracy.

Limitations

• Specific row and column counts are unknown, limiting precise assessment of dataset scale and feature completeness.
• Missing data is encoded with non-standard placeholders (-1, M, -2, N, -9), requiring preprocessing for analysis.
• The dataset's administrative attributes are from the 2021-22 school year and may not reflect current conditions.

Provenance

Source

National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) Education Demographic and Geographic Estimate (EDGE) and Common Core of Data (CCD) programs.

Collection Method

District boundaries collected by the U.S. Census Bureau for NCES; administrative characteristics reported by state education officials.

Time Range

2021-2022 school year.

Freshness

Last updated on the platform in October 2024, with annual updates from the source program.

Geography

United States, covering all public elementary, secondary, and unified school districts.