A Guide to Federal Datasets, Policy Questions, and Grant Funding Formulas
Every year, billions of federal dollars flow to more than 13,000 school districts based on a complex mix of demographic and financial data. The Data Atlas helps you navigate this landscape by exploring federal K–12 datasets, discovering which datasets can answer key policy questions, and tracing how data inform the funding formulas that direct resources to school districts and students.
The Data Atlas provides three pathways for navigating federal K–12 data, with the option to search directly.
Federal education data are collected across various agencies and programs, making it difficult to see how the pieces fit together. The Data Atlas brings these collections into a unified guide, detailing each dataset’s purpose, connections, and relevance to K–12 policy.
We built the Data Atlas by starting with the questions that matter. Select a question to discover what each federal dataset can tell you and how it connects to real-world policy issues.
Federal education grants depend on an underlying framework of demographic, geographic, and economic statistics to distribute funding to states. This interactive pathway reveals those connections, showing how administrative data flow into federal funding formulas and highlighting the real-world significance of these collections.