Web Site Addresses for Public Schools in the United States

The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) provides extensive downloadable data about U.S. public schools, including basic location and contact information. The web addresses (URLs) NCES provides for these schools, however, are often in fact the URLs of the school districts of which the school is a part. In order to study the web communication practices of individual schools more precisely, then, it was necessary for us to find school-specific web sites.

To that end, we enlisted an algorithmic approach that first conducted automated web searches for each school's name and address, then sifted through the results to find the most likely candidate URL for the school's own web site. Starting from NCES data for the 2019-2020 school year, the attached dataset (n=101,517) contains the output of this procedure: rows for all U.S. public schools, with columns including basic school information from NCES, along with one additional column labeled "Website" listing the school's most likely URL as determined by our own created algorithm. School URLs have not been comprehensively verified – please use at your own discretion.

The code used to derive this data is available at the link provided in the "Related" section of this entry.