About the dashboard
Sources of information
- Student data
Enrollment, assessment, and graduation data come from the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) Data Center and reflect available reporting from the 2018–2019 school year forward. Blank values in student data reflect student privacy-related data suppression by MDE. Note that no reading or math assessments were administered in 2019–2020. Student data were last updated January 18, 2024. - School district data
The dashboard reflects all education organizations on file with MDE as active schools or districts.
MDE tracks openings, mergers, and closures of education organizations over time. Student data for organizations that were later reassigned to new school districts are shown associated with their current districts. Data for organizations that were closed and not reassigned are not shown. School district data were last updated January 18, 2024. -
Geography
Legislative district boundaries come from the Minnesota Legislative Coordinating Commission Geographic Information Services Office Data Center. School district boundaries come from the Minnesota Geospatial Commons. Geographic boundary data were last updated January 18, 2024. -
Political representation
Political representation information comes from the Minnesota House of Representatives and the Minnesota Senate. Representation information was last updated January 18, 2024.
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Which school districts are included
All currently active public school districts that report enrollment and student achievement information to MDE are shown. These include traditional public districts, public charter districts, public special education cooperatives, and other types. Because they are tribally controlled, Bureau of Indian Education tribal schools are not shown.
How school districts are associated with legislative districts
For school districts with state-reported geographic boundaries—such as traditional public school districts—a school district is associated with a legislative district if one or more schools belonging to the school district are physically located within that legislative district or if the school district physically overlaps with the legislative district. A school district without state-reported geographic boundaries—such as a public charter school district—is associated with a legislative district if the school district has one or more schools physically located within the legislative district. To account for minor imprecisions in map layer data, a 250-meter inner buffer is used with district boundaries.
Demographic categories
Categories shown here follow MDE definitions and reflect school districts’ annual October 1 reporting. The category “students of color and Indigenous students” includes students reported as American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, Black or African American, Hispanic or Latino, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, Other Indigenous Peoples, or two or more races. The category “students eligible for free or reduced-price meals” includes students from those households meeting annual income-based criteria relative to annual U.S. Department of Agriculture guidelines.
While data shown in the dashboard reflect all student counts publicly available from MDE, suppression rules are applied by MDE before data release in order to protect student privacy. This means, for example, that in some districts, there are student subgroups whose testing or graduation counts are too small to be publicly released; in cases in which a student subgroup’s test or graduation outcomes are unknown, that subgroup is not included in the test or graduation numbers shown in the dashboard. For more information, please see MDE’s Data Practices documentation.
Planned update schedule
The dashboard will be updated periodically as relevant data become available. Examples of update events include the release of new legislative district boundaries from the Minnesota Legislature based on the decennial census and the annual release of graduation rates from MDE.