AS&U 100 2017

The school district numbers for 2015-16 show the same results they have for as long as records have been kept: The largest public school district in the United States is New York City.

The nation’s largest city had 1,141,232 students in its public schools in 2015-16. That’s a half a million more students than the next largest system, the Los Angeles Unified District.

The top spot is not the only place on the list with no change. The 18 largest districts in 2015-16 were the same as 2014-15—the Prince George’s (Md.) District is the only newcomer to the top 20. It added enough students in 2015-16 to move up two spaces to 19th.

School district enrollment numbers generally reflect the population of the area they serve. The overall population of the 100 largest districts was 77,232,138 in 2015, according to estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau, and public school students accounted for 14.28 percent of the population in those districts.

Steadily growing districts often have higher percentages of school children—six Texas district among the 100 largest have enrollments that account for more than 20 percent of their overall population. In the Frisco (Texas) district, among the fastest-growing in the nation, the 2015-16 enrollment of 53,130 accounted for 27.8 percent of the district’s population. 

As a rule, year-to-year enrollment changes are slight. Of the 100 districts, 88 saw increases or decreases of less than 2 percent. Sixty-seven reported increases, and 33 reported decreases.

The school system on the list with the greatest decrease in enrollment is the Shelby County (Tenn.) district, which has seen shifting numbers in recent years as it absorbed the much larger Memphis school system, then saw several suburban municipalities withdraw and form their own districts.

The 2015-16 enrollment in Shelby County was 112,085, down from 149,832 in 2013-14 and close to the 110,952 that the Memphis district reported in 2011-12.

In 2015-16, all but three of the 100 largest districts were on the 2014-15 list; those who made (rejoined, actually) the 100 largest: Oakland, Washington, D.C., and Portland. They supplanted the Anchorage, Tucson and Brownsville districts.

Texas has the most districts among the 100 largest—20. Florida has 14 districts among the top 100, but because the state has countywide school systems, they tend to be larger. Of the 14 Florida districts on the list, seven of them have more than 100,000 students, and four of them have more than 200,000.

The 14 Florida districts accounted for 1,989,277 students in 2015-16, compared with 1,603,572 students in the 20 Texas districts among the 100 largest.

Overall, the 100 largest districts accounted for 11,090,701 students in 2015-16—about 59,000 more than those districts had enrolled the previous year. 

The enrollment figures for 2015-16 and 2014-15 come from data compiled by state departments of education or individual school districts. The numbers may vary slightly from the numbers subsequently included in the National Center for Education Statistics.