Public schools, public data,
honest statistics.
SchoolFactors gathers all the public data we can find about California's public schools — test scores, demographics, staffing, spending — and analyzes what actually travels with strong and improving results. Everything is open source, every transform is documented, and every finding comes with its uncertainty attached.
What makes this site different
- Correlations, not causes. School-level data cannot say what a school causes — only how its students' results compare with schools serving similar students. Our language reflects that everywhere.
- Error margins always. Small schools are noisy by construction. We shrink estimates accordingly, show intervals, and say "not distinguishable from average" when that's the honest answer — no bare rankings.
- Data problems in the open. Official files contain real inconsistencies. We detect them with automated checks and publish them — see the data-quality report — rather than silently patching.
- Reproducible to the byte. The pipeline records the exact source URL and checksum of every file behind every number.