About the site
County-level school data, written in plain language.
SchoolsByCounty is independently published data journalism. We present the education statistics that the federal government already collects: graduation rates, per-pupil spending, public school records, district context, and enrollment data for every one of America's 3,144 counties.
What SchoolsByCounty Is
SchoolsByCounty is a data-journalism site, not an education advisory service. Our purpose is to take county-level education statistics published by the federal government and present them in a form a regular person can actually compare and understand. If you are evaluating school district quality in a region, comparing counties, or just want to know how your county stacks up nationally, this site is built for you.
Every page on the site is built from primary-source datasets: NCES Common Core of Data (CCD), NCES School District Finance Survey, and related federal public-school records. Each statistic is attributed to its source, and the underlying methodology — including the formula we use to compute composite school scores — is published on the methodology page.
Who Runs SchoolsByCounty
SchoolsByCounty is published and edited by Evan Brooks, Data Editor of the ByCounty Network. The site uses automated pipelines to ingest NCES public school and school-finance records, with ACS context included only where published. The broader ByCounty Network covers Census, EPA, and other federal datasets on separate county-data sites.
The data editor documents the methodology for composite scores and comparison tables across all 13 sites in the network, spot-checks AI-generated narratives for accuracy, and signs off on every published page. The data editor is the named editorial owner of this site: published statistics either match the source data or they are corrected.
The data editor is not a licensed educator, school administrator, or education policy expert, and SchoolsByCounty does not present itself as an education advisory service. We do not recommend specific schools, districts, or educational programs. Our role is the data-editor role — verify the numbers, respect the underlying confidence intervals, and decline to publish anything that strays beyond what the source data supports.
Long-form features and reported pieces, when published, carry a visible byline and — for topics that benefit from subject-matter expertise — a named reviewer credit at the top of the article.
Why I Built SchoolsByCounty
I started SchoolsByCounty after trying to compare school district quality and funding across counties for local education research. The NCES publishes extraordinary data through the Common Core of Data and district finance surveys, but it is buried in spreadsheets and technical documentation. I wanted a site where a regular person could see, in 30 seconds, how their county compares on graduation rates, per-pupil spending, district structure, and school-level coverage, with the sources right there on the page. No paywall, no gatekeeping, just public data presented honestly.
That same need shows up in every vertical we cover: property taxes, cost of living, crime, health, environmental risk. The government already collects this data. Our job is to clean it, verify it, and make it comparable.
How We Decide What to Publish
Two documents govern this site's editorial decisions:
- Editorial Standards — our mission, source policy, AI-usage policy, corrections process, funding disclosure, and update cadence.
- Methodology — the exact data sources, composite-score formula, limitations, and update cadence behind every page.
Both documents carry a "Last reviewed" date and are regenerated when our methodology changes.
Our Relationship to the Data
SchoolsByCounty is independent. We are not affiliated with the NCES, the U.S. Census Bureau, the U.S. Department of Education, or any government agency. We use their public datasets under the licenses they publish — for federal works, that is public-domain release. Each county page credits the data source that drives it.
When we link out — for example, to a state education agency or to NCES data tools — we link to primary sources, not aggregators.
AI in Our Workflow
Per-county pages include a short narrative summary generated with the assistance of Claude (Anthropic) from the same statistics shown on the page. This is a tool for turning a row of numbers into a readable paragraph; it is not the source of any data on the site. The narrative prompt is constrained to forbid unsourced claims, school recommendations, and inference beyond what the data supports. The Data Editor reviews the prompt and spot-checks output before publication. When source data is refreshed, narratives are regenerated.
We disclose this clearly because honesty is the right policy — and because Google's policies treat undisclosed AI authorship as a separate problem from AI authorship itself. The fix for AI prose on a data site is not to hide it; the fix is to pair it with a named human editor, a clear methodology, and source-grounded constraints. That is what we do.
Part of the ByCounty Network
SchoolsByCounty is one site in the ByCounty Network — a family of independent data sites covering property taxes, cost of living, income, crime, health, environmental risk, water quality, weather, and more. Visit CountyScore.com for the network's flagship hub, which combines every vertical's data into a single composite county report.
Contact
For data corrections, source attributions, partnership questions, or press inquiries, write to editorial@schoolsbycounty.com. See our editorial standards for the corrections process and timelines.
This page was last reviewed on by Evan Brooks, Data Editor.
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