NJ State-Federal School and District ID Crosswalk
Unique identifiers, such as an ID number, make datasets more usable by allowing one to link an observation in a dataset with the real-world entity it represents and also allow one to link information in one dataset with information from another dataset. In most cases, though, state and federal data systems use different identifiers, which can present a challenge to users and researchers. A crosswalk helps to overcome this by indicating the identifier used across multiple datasets.
The .dta and .csv files below are a crosswalk for New Jersey schools that include school and district identifiers used by the National Center for Educational Statistics and the New Jersey Department of Education. This crosswalk allows one to merge school- and/or district-level data from federal-level datasets together with data from the New Jersey Department of Education. This crosswalk was created by retrieving directory information from the NCES' Common Core of Data, performing minor cleaning on the identifiers used by the state, and appending multiple years so that the crosswalk can be used for all New Jersey Schools from the 2015-2016 school year through the most recent school year for which data are available.
Files
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NJ State-Federal School ID Crosswalk 2015/2016 to 2020/2021 Version 1
In the crosswalk, the variable year refers to the school year that corresponds to the identifiers (which in some cases may change over time) and the variables sch_name and lea_name refer to the name of a school and its district, respectively, as listed in the federal data system for that year.
Variables that correspond to identifiers used in federal datasets are fipst (the state's FIPS code, which is 34 for New Jersey), leaid (the district identifier used in federal datasets, the first two digits of which are the FIPS code for the state in which the district is located, followed by a 5-digit district identifier), schid (the school identifier for a school used - note that this value is may be repeated as schools in different districts may use the same school identifier), and ncessch (a 12-digit identifer, the first 7 of which are the same as leaid, followed by a 5-digit school identifier that is equal to schid with leading zeros included if schid is less than 5 digits). If merging district-level data, leaid is most likely the variable one would use while ncessch is most likely the appropriate identifier if merging school-level data.
Variables that correspond to identifiers used by the New Jersey Department of Education are county_district_code (the first two digits of which are the numeric code for the county in which a district is located, followed by the district ID number used by the New Jersey Department of Education) and county_district_school_code (which takes the value of county_district_code and adds the 3-digit school code used by the New Jersey Department of Education). If merging district-level data, county_district_code is the appropriate variable while county_district_school_code is the appropriate variable for merging school-level data.