Documentation to the NCES Common Core of Data Public Elementary/Secondary School Universe Survey: School Year 2008-09. Revised File Version 1b. NCES 2010-350 rev
Author: Sable, Jennifer
Date: 2010-08-00
Type: Reports - Evaluative
Subjects: Public Schools,Elementary Schools,Secondary Schools,Elementary Secondary Education,National Surveys,Data Collection,Institutional Characteristics,Student Characteristics,Geographic Location,Racial Differences,Ethnicity,Gender Differences,Immigrants,Socioeconomic Status,Records (Forms)

The Common Core of Data (CCD) nonfiscal surveys consist of data submitted annually to NCES by state education agencies (SEAs) in the 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, the four outlying areas (American Samoa, Guam, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, and the U.S. Virgin Islands), the Department of Defense (DoD) dependents schools (overseas and domestic), and the Bureau of Indian Education (BIE). In order to provide data comparable across states to the maximum extent feasible, NCES and representatives of the SEAs have worked since the 1950s to develop and accept common data items and definitions. School, agency, and state education data for the CCD are collected through the U.S. Department of Education's Education Data Exchange Network (EDEN). The data are edited by the U.S. Census Bureau and maintained in machine-readable datasets by NCES. They are used to produce general-purpose publications and specialized reports. The principal users of CCD nonfiscal data are the federal government; the education research community; state and local government officials, including school boards and local education agency (LEA) administrators; and the general public. The purpose of the CCD nonfiscal surveys is to provide a listing of all schools and agencies providing free public elementary and secondary education, along with basic descriptive statistical information on each school and agency listed. The CCD includes all settings in which free public education is provided to children. The Public Elementary/Secondary School Universe file includes data for the following variables: NCES school ID number, state school ID number, name of the school, name of the agency that operates the school, mailing address, physical location address, phone number, school type, operational status, locale code, latitude, longitude, county number, county name, full-time-equivalent (FTE) classroom teacher count, low/high grade span offered, Congressional district code, school level, free lunch eligible students, reduced-price lunch eligible students, total free and reduced-price lunch eligible, student totals and detail (by grade, by race/ethnicity, and by sex), and pupil/teacher ratio. The file also contains flags indicating whether a school is Title I eligible, schoolwide Title I eligible, a magnet school, a charter school, and/or a shared time school, and a flag indicating whether student counts by race/ethnicity were reported by five or seven racial/ethnic categories. The remainder of this document contains a user's guide and four appendixes. The user's guide contains information on CCD methodology, including certain conditions that are unique to this data file.