This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.
If you’re looking for an education-related figure, number, data point, or variable, chances are the new Pennsylvania School Data Project has you covered.
Conceived as a repository for researchers, journalists, policy wonks, and school administrators, the new website hosts more than a dozen spreadsheets packed with education data. The nonprofit Research for Action (RFA) spent more than six months collating federal, state, and local data to make the new databank.
The final product includes data on student test scores, suspensions, enrollment, and revenues. Crucially, data are assembled longitudinally, so you can track something — say a district’s graduation rate — from year to year. The oldest data go back to the 2006-07 school year.
RFA didn’t generate any new data for this project, but it stitched together data sets “that you would normally have to bring together in order to answer your research questions,” said research assistant Jason Fontana.