VISUALIZED AMERICAN PUBLIC SCHOOLS · CA
California Public Schools
The canvas comes first: every public school district in California, drawn from the federal boundary files. The data layers — enrollment change, funding, teachers, achievement — are built on top of this map, Missouri-style, in phases.
THE DISTRICT MAP
School district boundaries
Hover any district for its name. Boundaries are the 2024–25 school-year files from NCES EDGE / U.S. Census TIGER.
MAP IN PREPARATION
The California district boundary file hasn’t been generated yet.
Run scripts/make_boundaries.sh to rebuild boundaries/california.geojson, then redeploy.
Source: NCES EDGE Composite School District Boundaries, 2024–25 (via U.S. Census TIGER/Line). Unified and elementary districts shown; secondary districts omitted.
862 districts are drawn on this map — 345 unified and 517 elementary.
How districts are drawn here. California has separate elementary and secondary school districts whose territories overlap. To keep the map readable, it shows unified districts plus elementary districts — together they tile the state exactly, with no gaps and no overlaps. The 112 secondary districts are not drawn, because they sit on top of the elementary districts rather than beside them. Data joined to this map follows the same rule.
A note about charter schools. Charter schools enroll about 11.9% of California’s public-school students, and they are not drawn individually on this map — they have no attendance boundary to draw. But in California most charter schools are authorized by local school district boards, which means they generally sit inside the district boundaries you see here and count within those districts. What this map leaves out is the school-level detail, not the students themselves. A minority are authorized at the state level and enroll across district lines.
TEACHER PAY
What California pays its teachers
A first look, from the National Education Association’s 2024–25 salary benchmarks. These are California statewide averages of district salary schedules; a district-by-district map is the next layer (see the note below).
$59,424
Average starting teacher salary — bachelor’s degree, no experience.
NEA 2024–25 Benchmark Report
$118,850
Average top-of-schedule salary — the highest step and lane a teacher can reach.
NEA 2024–25 Benchmark Report
824
of California’s 1,051 school districts had salary data reported (78.4%).
NEA 2024–25 Benchmark Report
Source: National Education Association, 2024–2025 Teacher Salary Benchmark Report (April 2026), state tables ST-1 and ST-4. Figures are unweighted averages of district salary schedules; “starting” = bachelor’s degree with no experience, “top of schedule” = the highest step and lane. For reference, the national average starting salary was $48,112.
The district map is the next layer. A district-by-district salary map for California is being built from federal finance data — NCES teacher counts and the U.S. Census F-33 school-finance survey — to show an
average salary per district (a derived measure, and labeled as one). Until it lands, this page carries the verified statewide figures above. For the fully built version of this theme, see the Missouri flagship’s
Teacher Pay page.