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Most traditional public-school districts in the U.S. are defined by a geographic catchment area. Some schools—chiefly charter schools and Bureau of Indian Education (BIE) schools—are located in a school district’s geographic boundaries even though they are not administered by that school district. We assign all schools—including charter and BIE schools—to geographic districts starting in 1998-99 (the year that charter and magnet indicators became available) by spatially joining latitude and longitude coordinates of schools’ physical locations to annual school district boundary shape files provided by NCES Education Demographic and Geographic Estimates (EDGE). Latitude and longitude data are not available prior to 2000-01; we assign schools in 1998-99 and 1999-2000 to the same geographic district to which they are geocoded starting in 2000. Some schools in the 1998 or 1999 data did not exist after 2000; we geocode these schools’ street locations (provided by CCD) to obtain latitude and longitude and then spatially join them to school districts. Schools can be spatially joined to unified, elementary, and/or secondary school districts; for non-unified districts, we use high- and low-grade data to assign schools to either elementary or secondary districts. We link neighborhoods to geographic school districts using geographic crosswalks that use population weighting to assign tracts’ populations to the school district(s) in which they are located. Segregation data in the Segregation Explorer is reported for geographic school districts.

Data in the Segregation Explorer is reported for geographic school districts. Data for administrative school districts can be downloaded on the Get the Data page.