All data was acquired for the most recent year available as of January 2025.
School district geography: maps of school district geographies were created using the shapefiles from the US Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Education Demographic and Geographic Estimates (EDGE) for the 2022-23 school year. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/edge/Geographic/DistrictBoundaries
School district enrollment characteristics, per-pupil expenditures, student-teacher ratio, and student-counselor ratio for the 2023-24 school year come from the US Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Common Core of Data (CCD). https://nces.ed.gov/ccd/elsi/tableGenerator.aspx
School district enrollment by free- and reduced price- lunch programs for the 2021-22 school year come from the US Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Common Core of Data (CCD) https://nces.ed.gov/ccd/elsi/tableGenerator.aspx
School district-level data on poverty rates among relevant school-age children, parental employment rate, and language spoken at home come from the US Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Education Demographic and Geographic Estimates (EDGE) for 2018-22. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/edge/TableViewer/acsProfile/2022
School district AP participation and in-school suspension data come from the Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC) for the 2020-21 school year. https://civilrightsdata.ed.gov/data
School district graduation rates, grade 4 math proficiency, and grade 4 reading proficiency data come from the Department of Education ED Data Express for the 2020-21 school year. https://eddataexpress.ed.gov/download/data-library
School district educator profiles were acquired from individual state’s Department of Education, largely from the sources identified in the New Teacher Project’s National K–12 Teacher & Student Demographic Dashboards. https://tntp.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/K12-demo-data-documentation.pdf
School district-level information on year-to-year academic progress for low-income students come from the trend in test scores variable from the The Stanford Education Data Archive (SEDA) Version 5.0. https://edopportunity.org/get-the-data/seda-archive-downloads/#testscore-5
School district-level, within-district racial and economic segregation was calculated using the Theil Information Theory Index and enrollment data from the US Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Common Core of Data (CCD) described above.
School district-level information on cross-class friendships comes from the Social Capital Atlas study conducted by Opportunity Insights, Harvard University, and the U.S. Census Bureau. The study used anonymous data following millions of Americans from childhood to adulthood and included adults, aged 25-44, that use Facebook. https://edopportunity.org/get-the-data/seda-archive-downloads/#testscore-5