This blog post is part of a series on how to use the North Carolina Public Schools Statistical Profile. This blog post details how to download different indicators at the state level. We also have tutorials for how to download indicators at the district and school levels.
The North Carolina Public Schools Statistical Profile (NCPSSP) is a great resource for obtaining data on North Carolina’s public school students, personnel and finances. This profile is especially useful if you are looking for enrollment data (available at school, district and state levels) in traditional public and charter schools.
This blog post will detail how to download different indicators from the NC DPI Statistical Profile at the state level. For any table, data can be downloaded as a CSV file by clicking “Actions” which is located on the far-right side of the search bar, then selecting “Download”. A CSV will then be downloaded to your computer.
North Carolina Public Schools Statistical Profile website
When you open the North Carolina Public School Statistical website, you’ll see a menu on the right-hand side of the page. The menu is where we want to focus our attention.
The menu is split into four sections:
Part I. State Summary
Part II. Local Education Agencies (LEA)
Part III. Charter/Regional Schools
Part IV. Monthly Student Accounting
We’re going to start by heading into the State Summary section.
Let’s say we want to find out the final month of enrollment by grade for every public school district in the state during a particular school year. Enrollment numbers can be used as a way to calculate total student counts in schools. The final month of enrollment tells us how many students were in a given school during the last month of the school year.
To acquire this data, follow these steps:
State level information can be found in the section titled Part I. State Summary.
1. Under the header “State Summary,” click on the “Pupil Information” link. The link will open with a series of tables, each with different information about K-12 students in North Carolina.
2. Click on “Table 1-Interactive Report” under “Table 1 – LEA Final Pupils by Grade.” It’s a little tricky to find, so it’s highlighted below.
Table 1 – Interactive Report
I find that the interactive reports on the NC DPI Statistical Profile are easier to navigate for data downloads than their corresponding tables.
3. The table contains how many students were enrolled in all traditional public school districts, by grade level, in the state The first row of the data table shows: year, month, type, and grade levels. Clicking on any cell in the first row will display a filter for more nuanced views.
4. Click on “Type,” the title of column three. Here you can select what kind of enrollment specification you want to download (Enrollment, Average Daily Attendance (ADA), Average Daily Membership (ADM), etc.) “Month Final” indicates the last month of the school year.
The term enrollment indicates the number of students registered in the state’s public schools (traditional public and charter schools). Enrollment is not reduced by transfers, withdrawals, deaths or midyear graduations. Final enrollments (Month Final) therefore should not be compared to first month enrollment (Month 1).
Additional information on these enrollment types and definitions used in the table are found in the site’s introduction.
4. Select “Enrollment” as type since it is our variable of interest.
5. Click on the “Month” column and select “Month Final.”
The second column should read “Month Final” indicating we are looking at enrollment in the final month of school in the 2020-21 school year.
6. Click on the “Year” column and select “2021”. The table should now look like this.
7. From here click the “Actions” tab and then select “Download.”
This data will now be downloaded as a CSV onto your computer.
This process can be repeated for downloading state level enrollment by grade data from charter schools. Instead of selecting “Table 1-Interactive Report”, select “Table 3-Interactive Report” and repeat the steps above.
All graduating public high school students across North Carolina are asked to report their postsecondary intentions in the spring of their senior year. To find postgraduate intentions for a specific school year, follow these steps:
High School Graduates by Post Secondary Intention, 2021-22
This table displays post-secondary intentions by sex and race/ethnicity breakdowns. From here simply select 2021 in the “Year” column.
It is important to note that not all indicators in “Part I. State Summary” are aggregated at the State Level; if there is an LEA code present in the table, this data is at the district level.
Learn more about how to acquire data at the district or school level.
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