Organizations
Custom research for your organization.
Newsrooms, voter guides, advocacy groups, and academics bring us the questions they need answered: where candidates stand, how a board has behaved, what is happening in the districts you cover. We scope the work to your organization and answer the questions you want answered, for any district in the country.
What we do
Research tailored to your questions
Most people arrive asking for a file. What they usually need is an answer, and an answer takes a research team.
Your question, answered and cited
You bring the question: who is running in the districts you cover, and what has each one said about the thing you care about. We do the primary work: candidate statements, filings, questionnaires, candidate forums, local reporting, board minutes. Every claim comes back with the source against it, and we tell you plainly where the record is silent.
Cut to your scope, not ours
A table built for your question rather than our schema: your states, your districts, your date range, joined to whatever you already hold. Stable district IDs mean it lands in your data without fuzzy name matching.
Told when it moves
Filing windows close, candidates withdraw, boards appoint mid-term. We watch the districts you care about through the cycle and tell you what changed, with the receipt, instead of leaving you to re-check by hand.
Who does the work
A research team that knows school districts
Requests are handled by people who have done this work before: quantitative researchers who know what a defensible number looks like, and former educators who know how a district actually runs.
Statisticians and quantitative researchers
- /Know the difference between a finding and an artefact of a small sample
- /Will tell you when your question cannot be answered from the available record
- /Build the comparison properly: like districts against like districts
- /State uncertainty in the deliverable instead of burying it
Former educators and district staff
- /Have sat through the meetings and read the agendas from the inside
- /Know where a district actually publishes the thing you are looking for
- /Read a budget line or a superintendent contract the way a board does
- /Catch the local context a purely quantitative read would miss
How a request is handled
- /We scope it with you first and say plainly what is and is not findable
- /Primary sources only, with the URL and the date we checked it
- /Verbatim quotes where we quote: never a paraphrase presented as one
- /A written note on what we could not establish, delivered with the work
Scope
What you can ask us to find out
These are research questions, not database columns. Some of it we already hold; the rest we go and establish for your districts, and we are explicit about which is which.
On candidates
- /Stated positions on an issue you name, quoted verbatim with a source
- /Whether an incumbent is seeking re-election, and who is challenging them
- /Prior public service, prior runs, and how they did
- /Questionnaire and candidate-forum answers where any exist
- /Endorsements reported in local press: reported, never rated by us
- /Whether a filing is contested, unopposed, or already decided
On boards
- /Who holds every seat now, and which seats turn over when
- /Turnover and appointment history: who arrived by election and who did not
- /How a named board handled an issue, read out of its own minutes
- /Superintendent changes and contract timing
- /Where a board publishes its agendas, minutes, and meeting video
- /Seat structure: at-large, district, or mixed, and term length
On races and districts
- /Which races in a state are contested and which are walkovers
- /Enrollment, finance, and child-poverty trend behind a district
- /The state house and senate districts each school district sits inside
- /Comparisons across a whole state on any of the above
- /Filing deadlines and election dates, per state, with the statute
- /A straight read on which races are actually worth your coverage
The foundation
A national record underneath
The research runs on a record we build and maintain ourselves: every district with an elected board, the people serving on it, the seats on the ballot and who has filed for them, and the district's numbers behind all of it, each row with its source. That is why a question can be answered in days instead of from scratch, and why we can tell you up front where the record is thin.
Coverage varies by state and grows every week, so we would rather tell you the current picture for the districts you care about than print a number here that will be out of date by the time you read it. Ask, and we will say plainly which of your districts are complete and which are not.
Straight answers
Before you ask
We would rather you hear this here than find it afterwards.
What we won't do
We do not sell or publish the email addresses and phone numbers we hold for candidates and board members, to anyone, at any price. We do not rate or rank candidates, and we do not build anything that reads as an endorsement.
Get in touch
Tell us what you're working on
We'll come back with a straight answer on what the record shows for your districts, and what it would take to find the rest.