National Center for Education Statistics

The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) is an agency of the United States Department of Education. NCES maintains the Common Core of Data, a collection of datasets about public schools and accredited private schools in the U.S.

As a work of the federal government, the Common Core of Data is in the public domain. Individual states also maintain school directories, but the copyright status of state government works varies from state to state, making these national datasets particularly attractive as a data source for OSM.

Datasets

The following datasets are described as search engines, but search results can be exported as data tables:

Dataset	Attributes	Formats
College Navigator	Mailing address, phone number, website, degrees	Excel, CSV
Search for Public Schools	Physical address, phone number, district, state school ID, grades	Excel
Search for Private Schools	Physical address, phone number, grades, coed, religion/denomination, presence of library	Excel

NCES school IDs

NCES assigns each school a unique identifier, which can be tagged as nces:school_id=* or ref:nces=*.