Data and Access

SchoolDecoder publishes school-level Decoded Ranks — school rankings adjusted for school context — computed from public data. The Decoded Rank, the underlying School Alpha score, and the SchoolDecoder Scorecard are free at the consumer surface for parents, journalists, educators, and anyone reading a school page on the site. Programmatic access is offered in tiers for developers, brokerages, real estate platforms, researchers, and other data users.

For how the score is computed, see the methodology page. For source-level detail, see the data sources page.

What is free

Anyone can read SchoolDecoder without an account or a payment.

• Every school page (the SchoolDecoder Scorecard) with Achievement Rank, Decoded Rank, rank shift, story label, decoder sentence, subject rankings, and confidence line
• Every metro, state, and district ranking page
• Every annual metro report
• Methodology, data sources, and limitations pages
• Open Graph share cards for ranked schools
• Embeddable badges for schools with high decoded performance, where appropriate

The free consumer surface is the product. Programmatic access exists on top of it.

API tiers

API access is paid and tiered. Pricing and rate limits are calibrated against the cost of producing the differentiated data — School Alpha, peer ranks, subject ranks, confidence bands — that does not exist elsewhere. Comparable raw-lookup APIs from other school data products start in the same range; SchoolDecoder's price is justified by the context-adjusted data, not by the lookup.

Bulk dataset licensing — full metro or full national exports as flat files — is available separately from the API and is priced per metro, per state, or per national snapshot. Reach out for terms.

Licensing notes

The data underlying SchoolDecoder is public:

• State assessment data is published by state departments of education
• NCES Common Core of Data, Civil Rights Data Collection, and EDGE geocodes are published by the U.S. Department of Education
• Census ACS 5-year data is published by the U.S. Census Bureau
• OMB CBSA delineations are published by the Office of Management and Budget

SchoolDecoder's derived outputs — the School Alpha score, the Decoded Rank, the SES index, the rank shift, the story labels, and the SchoolDecoder Scorecard layout — are SchoolDecoder's. These are licensed for use through the API tiers above and through bulk licensing agreements.

What that means in practice:

• A journalist citing a single Decoded Rank in an article does not need a license. Cite the school page.
• A real estate site embedding SchoolDecoder school cards or surfacing Decoded Ranks at scale needs an API tier.
• A research project pulling derived scores for analysis should use the API; bulk licensing is available for large research datasets.
• Republishing the underlying public data the model is built on does not require permission from SchoolDecoder, because that data is public — but recomputing School Alpha requires SchoolDecoder methodology, which is documented but is not itself a free-to-redistribute dataset.

The Urban Institute distributes harmonized CCD and CRDC under the Open Database License (ODbL); SchoolDecoder credits Urban Institute when their harmonized form is used.

Get access

Programmatic access is launching with the API. Until the signup flow is live, organizations interested in API access, embeddable widgets, or bulk licensing can reach out for early-access conversations. Reporters working on a story that benefits from SchoolDecoder data are welcome to reach out for help with methodology or data extraction.

A self-serve signup will be added when the API ships. Until then, this page will be updated with contact details and an early-access form.

Citing SchoolDecoder

For journalism, research, and methodology citations, use a stable URL and the data vintage shown on the page.

Suggested format for a single school's Decoded Rank:

SchoolDecoder, "Woodstock Elementary SchoolDecoder Scorecard," accessed date, schooldecoder.com/school/or/410327-woodstock-elementary.

Suggested format for a metro report:

SchoolDecoder, "Year Portland-Vancouver Metro Report," schooldecoder.com/reports/portland-vancouver/year.

Suggested format for the methodology:

SchoolDecoder, "SchoolDecoder Methodology," schooldecoder.com/methodology.

When citing a Decoded Rank, please include the data vintage shown on the school page (assessment year, ACS vintage, CCD year). Including the vintage makes the citation reproducible, because SchoolDecoder updates ranks as new data lands and earlier numbers move when better inputs become available.

When describing the score in body copy, the consistent terminology is:

• Decoded Rank — the parent-facing rank, shown with the subtitle "adjusted for school context"
• School Alpha or Context-Adjusted Performance — the technical name for the underlying score
• Achievement Rank — raw test performance, presented alongside the Decoded Rank
• Rank shift — the difference between Achievement Rank and Decoded Rank
• SchoolDecoder Scorecard — the school page unit

Researchers comparing SchoolDecoder against other school rating products are welcome to reach out for methodology clarification, data dictionaries, and limitations discussion. SchoolDecoder takes correction seriously: when a material issue is found, the affected school, district, metro, report, sitemap, and share images are regenerated and a correction note is added if the public interpretation changes.