The National Center on School Infrastructure is a national resource hub that supports states and school districts in the stewardship of America’s elementary and secondary public school facilities.
Our comprehensive resource library offers easy access to high-quality guidance and practical tools for building, maintaining, and improving school buildings and grounds. Additionally, it centralizes state policies and facilities data, enabling informed decision-making at the federal, state, and local levels.
We work with expert partners to develop new tools for analyzing and interpreting complex information. Through training, technical assistance, and collaboration, we build connections and understanding across states and impact areas, focusing on areas with the highest needs.
Every school is unique, but all schools should be places where students thrive, teachers excel in their craft, and communities flourish.
All of America’s elementary and secondary public school facilities are educationally inspiring, safe, healthy, energy-efficient, adequately resourced, and protected from extreme weather. Every child, every educator, and every family, regardless of their background or zip code, can access a great public school facility that serves their community.
As a national resource hub, we connect people, resources, and ideas so that leaders across the country can develop and implement solutions to modernize their school buildings and grounds.
We listen to our community of state and local leaders to understand what tools and resources they need. We connect people with relevant resources and collaborate with field leaders and subject matter experts to create field-responsive materials. As a national hub, we identify trends and best practices and develop tools to analyze and interpret complex information for state and local contexts.
NCSI collects, categorizes, and distributes tools, research, policy, reports, data sets, news, and case studies through our website’s resource library. As the national clearinghouse for school facilities, we include high-quality, practical resources relevant to planning, building, operating, and improving school buildings and grounds. We organize all information by topic and U.S. state to ensure local and state decision-makers can access the information most relevant to them.
We build connections and understanding across states and impact areas through collaborative learning opportunities. We create and share new research and analysis. As a designated technical assistance provider to the Supporting America’s School Infrastructure (SASI) program of the U.S. Department of Education, NCSI provides targeted technical assistance and facilitates a learning community for SASI grantee states and territories.
NCSI operates as a consortium and draws on the distinctive expertise of our four member organizations.
UC Berkeley is the premier public university in the U.S. and is uniquely positioned to host NCSI. Berkeley’s Institute of Urban and Regional Development (IURD), in the College of Environmental Design, fosters stakeholder-engaged research and catalyzes investment in community adaptation and& resilience. Since 1962, IURD has spearheaded collaborative, interdisciplinary research and& praxis in relationship with underrepresented communities, engaging community activists and private investors as well as public agencies and& elected leaders.
Within IURD, the Center for Cities + Schools has cultivated expertise on public school facility issues, with nearly 20 years of experience providing research analysis and assistance to state and& local governments.
The 21st Century School Fund (21CSF) brings experience in research, policy analysis, and technical support to agencies at the local, state, and federal levels. In 1994, 21CSF began working with the District of Columbia Public Schools on its first facilities master plan in over 30 years. 21CSF was instrumental in bringing research evidence to inform policy reforms and inspire public support for a system-wide modernization program that resulted in the renovation or replacement of 70% of public schools in the District.
For more than 30 years, 21CSF has played a leading role in major national initiatives on school facilities. These include the “Building Educational Success Together” (BEST) supported by the Ford Foundation; support to form the National Council on School Facilities (NCSF); authorship of the landmark “State of our Schools” reports of 2013, 2016 and 2021 that have fostered national recognition of the scale, scope and distribution of spending on public school facility infrastructure; and leadership in founding the [Re]Build America’s School Infrastructure Coalition (BASIC) of civic, education, union, and industry members working together to inform and advocate for sound federal policy related to public school equity and infrastructure.
The National Council on School Facilities (NCSF) is a non-profit membership association of state-level public school facility officials. Its mission is to support states in their varied roles and responsibilities for the delivery of safe, healthy, and educationally appropriate school facilities that are sustainable and fiscally sound.
NCSF was formed in 2012, motivated at first by the prospect of federal investment in PK-12 school facilities through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Ultimately, funding was not included in that federal legislation; but, state officials realized that discussion about school facilities, in Congress and elsewhere, needed to be informed by reliable and comparable national data. In partnership with 21st Century School Fund, NCSF maintains state-level data profiles to inform decision-makers and the public about school facilities and infrastructure.
For over 40 years, Child Trends has been the nation’s most respected source for research on children. Child Trends promotes the well-being of children and youth through applied research that informs public policy, captures evidence of what works, and identifies young people who are overlooked or ill-served by public systems. Child Trends’ fields of expertise include early childhood, family formation, child welfare, childhood trauma, youth development, school climate, reproductive health, and juvenile justice.
Child Trends’ data analyses are commonly used by federal policymakers, by experts in their testimony before Congress and to state legislatures, in technical assistance to state and local agencies, and in media reporting on children’s issues. Child Trends researchers also deliver technical assistance directly to state and local decision makers, supporting the development of safe and supportive learning spaces and workplaces.
NCSI’s team is composed of staff from our four consortium members. We also rely on expert advisors from across the country.
We collaborate with field leaders and subject matter experts to create field-responsive materials.
Guide/Tool
National Center on School Infrastructure (NCSI)
This interactive dashboard allows users to visualize the scale, scope, and distribution of state and local public educational facilities inventory, investments, spending, and debt over time.
