NCES Common Core of Data, LEA Universe Membership and Staff Files
District-level student membership and staff counts from the Common Core of Data, used as the denominators behind the school staffing measures.
On this page
Two annual collections from the Common Core of Data, NCES's "comprehensive, annual, national database of all public elementary and secondary schools and school districts." The membership file reports student counts for each local education agency by grade, race and ethnicity, and sex. The staff file reports full-time-equivalent staff counts by category, including teachers, guidance counselors, school-level staff and district staff.
Coverage#
Two school years, 2023-24 and 2024-25, in the version 1a releases published in December 2024 and December 2025. The membership collection covers 18,651 districts and the staff collection 19,524 districts across the two years.
Publication lags the school year described by roughly eighteen months. Not every district reports every category, so a district can appear in one collection and not the other, or report students without reporting counselors.
How we use it#
These files supply the student, teacher, counselor and staff counts that the school staffing measures are expressed against — students per teacher, students per counselor, and staff per thousand students. They also give each district its current enrolment, which is what makes those ratios comparable between a small rural district and a large urban one.
The files are not published as a metric in their own right. The measures that rest on them are Student-Teacher Ratio, Student-Counselor Ratio and School Staff per 1k Students.
Citation#
U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Common Core of Data (CCD), LEA Universe Files, Version 1a: 2023-24 (NCES 2024251) and 2024-25 (NCES 2026005).
These are public-use data. NCES cautions that public-use files may contain edited, suppressed or imputed values, flagged as such in the released files.
References#
- 1National Center for Education Statisticshttps://nces.ed.gov/ccd/index.asp