Charter school data sources

School records come from the Common Core of Data (CCD), the U.S. Department of Education's annual database of public schools, published by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES).

We use the 2024–25 school directory, accessed September 14, 2026 through the Education Data Portal of the Urban Institute. The dataset includes 8,068 open schools flagged as charter schools across 47 states and territories.

Missing, suppressed and not-applicable values appear as a dash (—) or “Not reported,” never as zero or “No.” A reported zero is retained. Enrollment totals sum only reported values; medians exclude missing ratios and average the two middle values for even-sized samples. Location pages show reporting coverage.

All active school facts use the 2024–25 directory endpoint, which includes enrollment, teacher FTE and lunch fields. We do not fill missing current-year facts with older figures. The access date is when we retrieved the data, not a claim that current admissions, programs, phone numbers or school operation were independently verified.

We include charter-flagged records with NCES statuses Open, New, Added, Changed agency or Reopened. Closed, Inactive and Future records are not active search results. These are annual reported statuses, not a live school-opening check.

202 previously listed schools now have historical pages, kept at their original URLs but excluded from the sitemap and marked noindex. Their facts retain the original school-year label. Missing IDs were checked against the full directory, including non-charter records; absence alone is not treated as closure.