Certified Personnel (Teachers and Staff Credentials)

Staffing measures for Georgia school teachers, administrators, and support staff -- credentials, experience, salary, and demographics by school, district, and state, 2011-2024.

Source: Governor's Office of Student Achievement (GOSA)
Year coverage: 2011–2024
Updated: annual
Version: 1.0.0
Schema hash: 633b96090a27

Detail levels available

StateDistrictSchool · default

Overview

Georgia Office of Student Achievement (GOSA) Certified Personnel dataset, compiled from local school systems' Certified/Classified Personnel Information (CPI) submissions. For every Georgia public school, school district, and the state as a whole, publishes a complete grid of 27 staffing measurements per employee group (81 rows per entity-year): headcount by certificate level (Bachelor's through Doctoral, plus Other), certification status (Professional / Provisional), gender, employment status (Full/Part-time), position metrics (FTE position count, average annual/daily salary, average contract days), staff race/ethnicity, and years-of-experience bands (<1, 1-10, 11-20, 21-30, >30, plus the mean). The three employee groups are Administrators, PK-12 Teachers, and Support Personnel; coverage runs from the 2010-11 school year through 2023-24.

Row grain: One row per year, district_code, school_code, employee_type, measure_category, measure_subcategory.

Key metric

measure_value — Measure Value

The single headline value most answers want.

JSON schema →Data contract (YAML) →

Variables

Every column in the fact table. The code is the exact field name the API returns.

Column	Type	Unit	Range	Null?	Description
`year`Year	integer	—	—	no	Ending calendar year of the school year. Year 2024 = 2023-2024 school year. Derived from the bronze `LONG_SCHOOL_YEAR` column's ending year. Full description▾ Ending calendar year of the school year. Year 2024 = 2023-2024 school year. Derived from the bronze `LONG_SCHOOL_YEAR` column's ending year.
`district_code`District Code	string	—	—	yes	GOSA district code (FK to the education districts dimension): 3-digit zero-padded for standard districts, 7-digit for state/commission charter schools (present from 2012 onward). NULL for state-level aggregate rows (the bronze sentinel `ALL`). Full description▾ GOSA district code (FK to the education districts dimension): 3-digit zero-padded for standard districts, 7-digit for state/commission charter schools (present from 2012 onward). NULL for state-level aggregate rows (the bronze sentinel `ALL`). Joins districts; adds its label columns.
`school_code`School Code	string	—	—	yes	4-digit zero-padded GOSA school code (FK to the education schools dimension, composite key with district_code). NULL for district-level and state-level aggregate rows (the bronze sentinel `ALL`). Full description▾ 4-digit zero-padded GOSA school code (FK to the education schools dimension, composite key with district_code). NULL for district-level and state-level aggregate rows (the bronze sentinel `ALL`). Joins schools; adds its label columns.
`employee_type`Employee Type	string	—	—	no	Which staff group the measurement covers: administrators, PK-12 teachers, or support personnel. Full description▾ Employee group this measurement covers. Snake_case recode of bronze EMPLOYEE_TYPE: `administrators`, `pk_12_teachers`, `support_personnel`. 3 allowed values▾ `administrators` `pk_12_teachers` `support_personnel`
`measure_category`Measure Category	string	—	—	no	The category of staffing measure (e.g. certificate level, gender, positions, race/ethnicity, years of experience); pairs with measure_subcategory. Full description▾ High-level family of the measurement. Snake_case recode of bronze DATA_CATEGORY. Together with `measure_subcategory` it fully identifies what `measure_value` represents; the family is functionally determined by the label (27 valid pairs, enforced by a quality check). 7 allowed values▾ `certificate_level` `certified_personnel` `gender` `personnel` `positions` `race_ethnicity` `years_experience`
`measure_subcategory`Measure Subcategory	string	—	—	no	The specific staffing measure within its family (e.g. 5_yr_masters, average_annual_salary, full_time); defines what measure_value means and its unit. Full description▾ Specific measurement within the family. Snake_case recode of bronze DATA_SUB_CATEGORY — e.g. `5_yr_masters` (family `certificate_level`), `average_annual_salary` (family `positions`), `less_than_1` / `average` (family `years_experience`). `other` is the fifth CERTIFICATE LEVEL bucket (bronze `Other *`; the asterisk flags a source footnote), not a race value. `asian_pacific_islander` is the bronze staff-race label `Asian`: the source publishes only 6 race buckets with no separate Pacific Islander label in any year, and state-level race-bucket sums equal the gender-bucket sums (same population) — the pre-1997 OMB combined Asian + Pacific Islander bucket per data-cleaning-standards §5b. 27 allowed values▾ `11_to_20` `1_to_10` `21_to_30` `4_yr_bachelors` `5_yr_masters` `6_yr_specialists` `7_yr_doctoral` `asian_pacific_islander` `average` `average_annual_salary` `average_contract_days` `average_daily_salary` `black` `female` `full_time` `greater_than_30` `hispanic` `less_than_1` `male` `multiracial` `native_american` `number` `other` `part_time` `professional` `provisional` `white`
`measure_value`Measure Value	number	—	—	yes	The measurement's value; its unit (headcount, FTE, dollars, days, or years) depends on measure_category and measure_subcategory, so filter to one pair before aggregating. Full description▾ Numeric value of the measurement. UNITS DEPEND ON (measure_category, measure_subcategory): a whole-person headcount for the 22 count labels (all of certificate_level, certified_personnel, gender, personnel, race_ethnicity, and the five years_experience bands); an FTE-style fractional position count for positions/number; US dollars for positions/average_annual_salary and positions/average_daily_salary; days for positions/average_contract_days; years (0.01 precision) for years_experience/average. NEVER sum or average across rows without first filtering to a single (measure_category, measure_subcategory) pair — and never sum `average*` labels across entities at all. No `unit` marker is declared because the unit varies by row; range invariants are enforced by quality checks instead (non-negative everywhere; headcount labels integral; experience average within [0, 60]; contract days within [0, 366]). Known source quirk preserved per §4b (extreme-but-conceivable): in the 2016-17 file ONLY, the certified_personnel family (professional/provisional) is uniformly depressed at every level (state professional PK-12 teachers = 2,689 vs ~110,000 in adjacent years) yet internally consistent (district sum 2,690; school sum 2,748) — a GOSA scope/definition glitch for that family-year, served as published.

Filters

Query parameters the fact endpoint accepts. Comma-separated values are OR within a parameter; multiple parameters AND together.

Parameter	Kind	Allowed values	Notes
`year`	year_exact	any value	—
`year_min`	year_range	any value	—
`year_max`	year_range	any value	—
`detail`	detail	`districtsschoolsstates`	enum-enforced, default: schools
`district_code`	foreign_key	any value	multi-value
`school_code`	foreign_key	any value	multi-value
`employee_type`	categorical	`administratorspk_12_teacherssupport_personnel`	multi-value, enum-enforced, pick one
`measure_category`	categorical	7 allowed values▾ `certificate_level` `certified_personnel` `gender` `personnel` `positions` `race_ethnicity` `years_experience`	multi-value, enum-enforced, pick one
`measure_subcategory`	categorical	27 allowed values▾ `11_to_20` `1_to_10` `21_to_30` `4_yr_bachelors` `5_yr_masters` `6_yr_specialists` `7_yr_doctoral` `asian_pacific_islander` `average` `average_annual_salary` `average_contract_days` `average_daily_salary` `black` `female` `full_time` `greater_than_30` `hispanic` `less_than_1` `male` `multiracial` `native_american` `number` `other` `part_time` `professional` `provisional` `white`	multi-value, enum-enforced, pick one
`district_type`	dimension_attribute	7 allowed values▾ `commission_charter` `resa` `standard` `state_agency` `state_charter` `state_school` `state_special`	multi-value, enum-enforced

Example requests

Run these against the base URL — they return live data.

All rows (first page), schools level

curl "https://georgiacivicdata.org/api/v1/education/certified_personnel"

schools data for 2024

curl "https://georgiacivicdata.org/api/v1/education/certified_personnel?year=2024"

Filtered to employee_type = administrators for 2024

curl "https://georgiacivicdata.org/api/v1/education/certified_personnel?year=2024&employee_type=administrators"

One district (code 644), 2024

curl "https://georgiacivicdata.org/api/v1/education/certified_personnel?district_code=644&year=2024&detail=districts"

Download 2024 as CSV

curl "https://georgiacivicdata.org/api/v1/education/certified_personnel?year=2024&format=csv"

Notes & limitations

NULL handling

Zero is a real, reported value.

Limitations

This source has no suppression markers in any year (2010-11 through 2023-24); zero counts are published as real `0` values, and every bronze MEASURE value parses to a valid number. measure_value has heterogeneous units that depend on (measure_category, measure_subcategory): a whole-person headcount for certificate_level / certified_personnel / gender / personnel / race_ethnicity / years_experience (except `average`); an FTE-style fractional count for positions/number; US dollars for positions/average_annual_salary and positions/average_daily_salary; days for positions/average_contract_days; and a mean in years for years_experience/average. Never aggregate measure_value without first filtering to a single (measure_category, measure_subcategory) pair, and never sum `average*` labels across entities. measure_category is functionally determined by measure_subcategory (27 valid pairs). There is no `demographic` column: gender and race/ethnicity here describe STAFF and are measure families, not a cross-cutting demographic axis, so these rows do not join the demographics dimension; the race_ethnicity family uses the pre-1997 OMB combined `asian_pacific_islander` bucket (no separate Pacific Islander label exists in the source). Known source quirk: the 2016-17 certified_personnel family (professional/provisional counts) is uniformly depressed at every level (~2% of adjacent years' magnitude) yet internally consistent across levels — preserved as published; do not trend that family across 2017. School rows must not be summed to rebuild district or state headcounts: staff serving multiple schools are counted once per school assignment but deduplicated at higher levels, so a district count can even be smaller than a single school's count (observed only in personnel/part_time; 1,811 cells). State rows have NULL district_code and school_code; district rows have NULL school_code.