About EduSignal

What is EduSignal?

EduSignal is a free reference tool for looking up and comparing K-12 school district data in the United States. We aggregate publicly available education data — enrollment, demographics, academic performance, and finances — for 13,000+ districts across all 50 states and DC into a single, well-designed interface.

AI-generated plain-English summaries on every state and district profile to help you understand the data, and helpful search tools to explore districts across the country.

Who Maintains This?

EduSignal is a side project built and maintained by a small volunteer team. It's a passion project that grew out of academic and professional interests in exploring the vast and wildly varied state and availabilitity of national, state, and local public education data.

From a cost or revenue perspective, the goal is simple: keep the lights on, cover the costs, and make something hopefully useful to others. We don't make money off this.

Why Does EduSignal Exist?

Public education data in the United States is fragmented and often hard to access. The federal government publishes data through NCES, but it's scattered across multiple databases with varying formats and multi-year lags, and in today's environment even the continued existence and validity of it is in question. Each state maintains its own department of education/instruction website, each with different data structures, naming conventions, and reporting timelines. Many districts also publish their own data, but many don't.

If you want to look up a single district — its enrollment, demographics, test scores, and spending — you might spend 20-30 minutes bouncing between five different websites, downloading spreadsheets, and trying to match data that doesn't quite line up. Comparing districts, especially across state lines, can therefore quickly become a nightmare.

EduSignal is designed to do that work for you. We collect the data 1-2x each year, normalize it, and present it in a consistent and visually accessible format. One search, one profile, (most) everything in one place. Plus some simple AI summaries and tools to make it more interesting and useful.

What Data Does EduSignal Cover?

We cover 13,000+ public school districts across all 50 states and the District of Columbia. For each district, we provide:

• Enrollment — Total students, year-over-year trends, school counts by level
• Demographics — Racial/ethnic composition, economically disadvantaged students (FRPL), English learners, students with disabilities
• Academic Performance — Math and reading proficiency (where available), graduation rates, chronic absenteeism
• Finances — Per-pupil spending, total budget, revenue source breakdown (federal, state, local). Where available
• Staffing — Teacher counts, student-teacher ratio, counselors, administrators

Data comes from federal sources (NCES Common Core of Data, F-33 Finance Survey, EDFacts) and state departments of education. See our Data Notes page for full methodology details. Do note that not every state publishes every datapoint in a way we can access, so there will be some gaps or variability across states.

Who Uses EduSignal?

Anyone who wants to understand public data about a school district, or group of districts. That could include parents or community stakeholders, journalists, academics, grant writers, researchers, or most anyone else who has an interest.

We also offer an API and MCP server for developers building education-related applications, plus limited exports for free registered users, and paid bulk data exports if you want the whole database.