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Is there an up-to-date and regularly maintained open database of elementary, middle, and high schools in the United States?

I'm looking for both public and private schools. Names alone would be a good start, but of course addresses (at least a state and city) and phone numbers would be very useful.

Patrick Hoefler
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Andrew Cheong
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3 Answers3

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The "Common Core of Data" (CCD) maintained by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), U.S. Department of Education (ED) is your starting point.

For Public Schools (PK-12), see http://www.ed.gov/developers and http://www.data.gov/education including:

  • Public elementary/secondary school listing
  • School district / Local education agency (LEA) listing
  • Public elementary/secondary school universe survey

For Private Schools (PK-12), see * http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pss/ - Private School Universe Survey and its associated data tables at http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pss/tableswhi.asp

David H
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There are several datasets that might be useful to you. The list you are seeking is the Public Elementary/Secondary School Universe Survey Data, with details here. This provides a listing of all public elementary and secondary schools, student data, and teacher information. This includes the names, addresses, and telephone numbers.

In addition, overall statistics on elementary and secondary schools can be found at the ED Data Express. This lets you explore many different aspects of data in schools (public and charter) in any or all states.

Jeanne Holm
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3

Unfortunately, the key links in the popular answers for this question are all currently broken. It is still true, as David H answered, that the Common Core of Data is the official source, but the links to data.gov are broken.

Now, the only relevant thing on data.gov is the page about the School & District Navigator which links to an interactive map that doesn't itself offer data.

However, the Department of Education has a simple interactive tool which helps get access to specific CCD files, "fiscal" or "non-fiscal", at the state, district, or school level.

Along the way, I also found public schools as GIS data from the DHS Homeland Infrastructure Foundation-Level Data (HIFLD) website.

The Department of Education also created a polished "Developer Hub" referencing supported and legacy APIs, but the dates on blog posts for that are all at least 3 years old right now, so it's hard to know what's actively supported -- and in any case, none of the APIs are for K-12 schools.

Joe Germuska
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  • Thanks for the note that the old data was not good. The DHS Homeland Infrastructure was just what I needed.

    Has Address, FIPS, lat,long, enrollment, ft_teachers, and grade levels (start and stop). There is a CSV: https://hifld-geoplatform.opendata.arcgis.com/datasets/public-schools/data

     – chongman Feb 12 '21 at 20:41
  • I put some of the data up on ObservableHQ, so that it can be downloaded and explored online. https://observablehq.com/@chonghorizons/data-of-all-us-public-schools – chongman Feb 17 '21 at 01:59