This documentation is for the provisional version 2a file of the National Center for Education Statistics' (NCES) Common Core of Data (CCD) Public Elementary/Secondary School Universe Survey for School Year (SY) 2013-14. It contains a brief description of the data collection, along with information required to understand and access the data file. The CCD is a national statistical program that collects and compiles administrative data from state education agencies (SEAs) covering the universe of all public elementary and secondary schools and school districts in the United States. The Public Elementary/Secondary School Universe Survey is one of five annual surveys that comprise the CCD. The other four surveys are the Local Education Agency Universe Survey, the State Nonfiscal Survey of Public Elementary/Secondary Education, the National Public Education Finance Survey, and the School District Finance Survey. The Education Sciences Reform Act of 2002 (20 U.S.C. § 9543) requires NCES to collect, acquire, compile and disseminate information about elementary/secondary education, and the CCD provides essential components about public education in the United States through use of administrative data. The scope of the CCD public school universe covers the 50 states, the District of Columbia, and five U.S. Island Areas (American Samoa, Guam, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands). Schools that are supported by the Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA) and the Bureau of Indian Education (BIE) are also included in the universe. SEAs report school-, agency-, and state-level education data for each school year through the U.S. Department of Education's EDFacts Submission System (ESS). While each SEA maintains its own public education data systems, NCES and SEAs work cooperatively to develop and accept common data items and definitions in the goal of producing consistent and comparable statistical data that are critical to NCES' mission to report complete statistics on the condition of education in the United States. The school universe serves as a basis for all other administrative data collections within EDFacts that collect data at the school level. These include data that are used by NCES to produce official statistics and data that are used by other offices within the Department of Education to administer federal education programs. Additionally, the school directory data are frequently used developing sampling frames for surveys such as NCES' National Assessment of Education Progress or the Schools and Staffing Survey. The school universe data are also useful to (1) chief officers of state education agencies, (2) policymakers in the executive and legislative branches of federal and state governments, (3) education policy and public policy researchers, (4) the press, and (5) citizens interested in information about public schools.