National source of detailed population and housing data; it is collected continuously and published annually as 1-year and 5-year estimates by the Census. The ACS includes thousands of variables across 40+ topics, such as income, poverty, disability, housing, commuting, language, and educational attainment. The ACS serves as the foundation for federal K-12 funding formulas via child poverty estimates (SAIPE), LEA-level socioeconomic profiles, equity analyses, and understanding the broader context in which K-12 schools operate (i.e. housing stability information, poverty, disability, etc.).
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.
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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.