Data Dictionary
There are more than 14,000 school districts in the United States, all of whom have their own accounting systems and ways of classifying spending. In most cases, these districts must report their spending annually to 50 different states, each of which have different funding formulas, tax structures, and finance policies.
In order to report large sets of education finance statistics, the collector must make changes to the source data in an attempt to make the numbers more uniform. These adjustments, however, can often create significant fluctuations in values that could make data incommensurate or incomparable. This tool, EdFund's Data Dictionary, is designed to help analysts and researchers identify particularities in datasets that should be understood and/or changed prior to use.