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 available on the public website for parents, journalists, educators, and other readers. A licensed API and bulk-data product are not currently available.

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

For institutional discovery, view the Synthetic District Portfolio Specimen. It includes downloadable JSON and CSV evaluation files derived from the same fictional fixture. They are noncommercial integration samples, not a licensed API or production dataset; no paid pilot or institutional data product is currently available. A discovery-only intake appears there only when a monitored channel is available.

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 public website is the current product. Its internal and public JSON endpoints are implementation details, not a stable licensed API contract.

Programmatic and bulk access

SchoolDecoder is evaluating versioned data delivery for research, journalism, real estate, and education organizations. There is currently no self-serve signup, published commercial price list, service-level agreement, or generally available bulk license.

Before a licensed delivery is offered, SchoolDecoder is completing source-by-source rights review, field-level provenance, versioned delivery contracts, and reproducibility checks. Public availability of a source does not by itself establish permission for every form of commercial reuse or redistribution.

Do not build a production integration against undocumented endpoints or assume that a public JSON response grants commercial redistribution rights.

Licensing notes

SchoolDecoder uses publicly accessible government and nonprofit data. Reuse terms differ by source and, for some state datasets, by publication year:

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 authors the software, explanatory text, visual presentation, and compilation used on this site. Factual source data and calculated values may carry source-specific terms; the documented methodology is not itself a grant of rights to redistribute source data or a promise of commercial exclusivity.

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 or other application should not embed undocumented endpoints or redistribute downloaded records without a written agreement and source-rights review.
Researchers may cite public pages. A reproducible bulk research release will require a versioned data contract and complete source attribution before it is offered.
Anyone reusing an underlying source must review that source's own license, attribution, and permission requirements.

The Urban Institute distributes Education Data Portal data under the Open Data Commons Attribution License (ODC-By) 1.0. Its citation guidance calls for the dataset names, portal version, access date, portal URL, and license.

Get access

Institutional and commercial access is not generally available. SchoolDecoder may publish a monitored discovery-only intake to collect workflow and evaluation requirements. Submitting a use case does not request or create access, a quote, a paid pilot, a license, an API, an SLA, or a delivery commitment. Any later proposal remains subject to exact-scope source-rights review and documented authorization.

No student-level records or personally identifiable student data are collected or offered. Any future delivery will be limited to aggregate public-school data and documented derived measures.

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/411004-woodstock-elementary-school.

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

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.