For researchers
The Atlas is a growing worldwide directory, with coverage currently strongest in the United States. If you study the field, report on it, or train the people who work in it, this page describes what you are looking at.
Sources. Listings are seeded from public data: the NCES Common Core of Data for public schools, the NCES Private School Universe Survey for private schools, and state licensing and nonprofit registry data added source by source. Schools then claim and maintain their own listings. Member directories of AMS, AMI, and the NCMPS Census are never ingested.
Provenance. Every field on every listing carries its source, its date, and whether it was seeded from public data, school-claimed, or verified with documentation. Listings display one of three trust states, and the state is never inflated.
Limitations, stated plainly. Survey-seeded facts age (the current private school data is from the 2021-22 PSS collection). Program levels derived from grade spans miss infant and toddler programs. Coverage of very small schools depends on public submissions. Coverage and source types vary by country. Missing information should not be treated as a negative finding. Counts on the stats page are counts of listings, not certainties about the field.
Citing the Atlas. Cite as: The Montessori Atlas, a Montessori Makers Group project, with the page title, page URL, and date you accessed it. The live directory changes over time. A calendar month is not a frozen dataset version. For reproducible analysis, keep the extract you used and record its retrieval date and filters.
Research data
Sample and data requests
A small sample of the dataset, to see the shape of the fields before requesting more. Columns: name, city, state, country, levels (pipe-separated), governance, listing status (trust state), website.
Download sample CSVNeed a fuller extract for research, or a specific slice (a country, a level, a trust state)? Tell us what you need and how you'll use it: info@montessorimakers.org.