API for Address -> School District Lookup?

Question

Is there a way to programmatically determine what School District a given physical street address in the US is tied to?

Answer 1

The US Census Bureau coordinates with local school districts from each state to understand boundaries along with any changes. This information is published every other year by the Census Bureau itself in their "Tiger" data:

http://www.census.gov/did/www/schooldistricts/data/boundaries.html

(A relatively easy way to read the data is using PostGIS under PostgreSQL)

But before all of that, you need to make sure you're working with a correct address. The reason is that the address may not even exist at all or may be formatted incorrectly such that you are unable to determine a match. Furthermore, if the ZIP Code is wrong or street information is misspelled, or the person accidentally reversed the "North" or "South" part of an address, e.g. 123 North Main Street, that could put the coordinate in the wrong school district. So as a precursor to running your addresses through PostGIS, you'll definitely want to look at using an address verification service to make sure you've got good data to start with. (Full disclosure: I'm the founder of SmartyStreets, we do address verification.)