Massachusetts Data Desk

Find the records behind a local education story. Start with a jurisdiction, inspect the reporting period and definitions, and download evidence you can check and cite. Coverage is source-specific. Missing or suppressed values are not zero, and similarly named measures are not necessarily comparable across states.

District / agency profiles
425
School profiles
1815
Coverage snapshot generated (not government release date)
2026-09-23T13:57:12.972Z
District experience
Does every district have a page built on the shared design, with its sources disclosed? 425 of 425 applicable districts covered; complete.
Finance detail
What did the district spend, broken down by function and line item? 399 of 400 applicable districts covered; partial.
Trends
How has a figure moved across years, on one consistent definition? 399 of 400 applicable districts covered; partial.
Comparisons
Can a district be put beside its peers on the same measure, year and scope? 400 of 400 applicable districts covered; complete.
Funding and taxes
Where does the money come from, and what does it cost a taxpayer? 320 of 320 applicable districts covered; complete.
Staffing
How many staff, in which roles, and what are they paid in aggregate? 400 of 400 applicable districts covered; complete.
Outcomes
Graduation, assessments and classroom measures. 400 of 400 applicable districts covered; complete.
Students
Enrollment, demographics and student groups. 400 of 400 applicable districts covered; complete.
Programs
What courses and pathways are taken, and by how many students? 306 of 310 applicable districts covered; partial.
Climate
Attendance and discipline. 396 of 399 applicable districts covered; partial.
Schools
Does each school have its own sourced profile, joined to its district? 395 of 399 applicable districts covered; partial.
Fiscal transparency
Fiscal health, reserves, budgets and the source documents themselves. 319 of 320 applicable districts covered; partial.
Distribution
Is every district and school page crawlable, linked and in the sitemap? 425 of 425 applicable districts covered; complete.
Why coverage is 99.7%
4,134 of 4,148 district-by-topic cells have a published figure; 0 are withheld by the agency and 14 are documented as not published.
Programs
306 of 310. Chapter 74 career and technical programme directory: 425 districts. Notes differ by district. One example: DESE publishes no bulk district-level directory of approved Chapter 74 programmes; its programme-list page returned HTTP 404 when this build was assembled on 22 September 2026. Chapter 74 enrolment by programme, shown above, comes from the Education-to-Career pathways dataset instead. DESE programme reports: 89 districts. Notes differ by district. One example: DESE’s 2024–25 school list shows no school in this district serving grades 9–12, and DESE’s 2025–26 pathways enrolment and 2024–25 Advanced Placement files — high-school measures — have no rows for it.
Schools
395 of 399. School profiles: 5 districts. Notes differ by district. One example: DESE’s 2024–25 school list, the source of every Massachusetts school profile on this site, has no school for this district, so no school profile is shown. This page reports the district-level figures DESE publishes for it.
Climate
396 of 399. DESE attendance and discipline reports: 24 districts. Notes differ by district. One example: This is an educational collaborative, which NCES classifies as a service agency. DESE’s district-level attendance and discipline files used on this site contain no rows for it: collaboratives serve students on behalf of their member districts, and those students are reported by the districts they belong to. DESE attendance and discipline reports: 4 districts. Notes differ by district. One example: DESE’s 2024–25 and 2025–26 reports — the years this site’s attendance, discipline, pathways and Advanced Placement figures come from — have no rows for this district, and DESE’s 2024–25 school list lists no school for it. Its most recent figures on this page are from earlier years.
Limitation
DESE publishes Massachusetts district finance as expenditure by function and by spending category, not as revenue by source. Chapter 70 state aid and the required local contribution, shown above, are funding requirements rather than a revenue statement.
Limitation
There is no school budget ballot in Massachusetts. A municipal budget is adopted by town meeting or city council and a regional district budget by its member municipalities, so no district-level vote result is collected by any state agency.
Limitation
Massachusetts school districts are departments of a municipality, or regional districts assessed on their member municipalities, with no independent taxing authority. The Commonwealth levies no school tax, sets no school tax rate and holds no school budget vote, so a New York-style school tax bill does not exist here. The municipal Proposition 2½ figures above are the whole property-tax picture.
Limitation
Massachusetts publishes no statewide named-educator salary disclosure. CTHRU, the Commonwealth’s payroll transparency portal, covers state employees; teachers, principals and superintendents are employed by municipalities and regional districts and are not in it. DESE publishes district averages, which are shown above.
Limitation
Massachusetts stopped using free and reduced-price lunch eligibility as an economic measure in 2014–15, because Community Eligibility made it unusable as a poverty indicator. DESE reports Economically Disadvantaged instead — students directly certified through SNAP, TAFDC, DCF foster care or MassHealth — which is the Low income measure shown above. The two are not comparable and are never trended across the 2014–15 change.
Limitation
DESE publishes no bulk district-level directory of approved Chapter 74 programmes; its programme-list page returned HTTP 404 when this build was assembled on 22 September 2026. Chapter 74 enrolment by programme, shown above, comes from the Education-to-Career pathways dataset instead.
Limitation
Massachusetts maintains no central repository of school-district audits or annual comprehensive financial reports. DESE publishes net school spending compliance, shown above; each municipality and regional district holds its own audit.
Limitation
DESE and the Division of Local Services publish net school spending compliance, Chapter 70 requirements and certified free cash only for districts and municipalities. No school-level reserve, budget-compliance or audit figure is published, so school pages carry DESE’s school spending allocations but no fiscal-transparency measure.
Reporting kits
No reporting kit download is offered for Massachusetts. Held from open data pending permission: Mass.gov's terms allow redistribution only unaltered and free of charge, and the open-data files are CC BY 4.0. Each figure and its source remain on the district profiles.

Reporting areas

Source documents

District profiles

Coverage, reporting and contact