What data exists?

• OSPI data -- This is data that is provided  by each district to the state's Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI). OSPI then republished in various forms.  If you see someone talking about "reportcards" that is OSPI.  Public Records Requests can be made to OSPI. They often respond fast (within weeks).  Most of reports can be viewed in the OSPI Data portal. It can also be accessed programmatically via the ODATA API endpoint.  Raw data is published in a less consistent manner, often as Excel files, CSVs, or Access database files. The largest of these are the School Apportionment and Financies Services (SAFS) raw data files which are used for allocating money to each district.

• Seattle Public Schools data -- This is data published, often as materials for the board. It has more details than state data but if often published in PDFs that are hard to ingest, do not have a fully consistent schema from year to year, and may not be fully self-consistent. The most common examples of these are the Budget Books that describ the budget the board of directors sign each year, and the P223 monthly enrollment data which gives more detail than the SAFS enrollment data republished by OSPI.

• Data hosted on SPS By The Numbers -- The above data sets are often in formats that are hard to load into a spreadsheet. Sometimes they also disappear. To try an remove those issues, this site contains snapshots of the above raw data saved in Google Cloud Storage. It is publicly accessible -- you just need a (free) Google Account. Additionally, a large portion of the data above has been loaded into BigQuery to facilitate longitudinal analysis. This is also public to use and will remain so unless usage gets high enough to cost money (unlikely).

If you have suggestions for other data sources, please let us know by emailing sps.by.the.numbers at gmail.com.