Instructional Level

Schools come in all combinations of grades. To allow comparisons across states, instructional level is determined in this report by the lowest and highest grade in a school. Among the 91,380 schools with membership during the 2001-02 school year, 58 percent spanned the primary grades, beginning with prekindergarten or kindergarten and going no higher than grade 8 (table 3; see Key Terms for complete definitions of instructional levels). The proportion of students who were enrolled in primary schools averaged 49 percent across all states, ranging from 42 percent in Alaska to 59 percent in the District of Columbia.

Middle schools, those with grade spans ranging from as low as grade 4 to as high as grade 9, made up 17 percent of schools with students. High schools (low grade of 7 or higher, high grade of 12) accounted for an additional 19 percent of schools. Some 6 percent of schools had a grade configuration that did not fit into any of these three categories.

A total of 14,229 regular school districts were reported to have students in membership for 2001-02 (table 4). As with the instructional levels of schools, grade span categories of school districts were assigned by the lowest and highest grades offered. Approximately 75 percent of school districts included the comprehensive range of grades from prekindergarten, kindergarten, or grade 1 to 9 or higher, and they accounted for 92 percent of all public school students. These comprehensive school districts accounted for all, or all but one, of the districts in 17 states. (In fact, only in Arizona, Illinois, Montana, and Vermont did as many as one-third of the students attend school districts with other grade spans.) A little more than 5 percent of students were in districts with no grade higher than 8, and about 2 percent were in secondary districts with no grade lower than 7. Less than 1 percent of students were enrolled in districts with some other range of grades.

Tables A-6 and A-7 provide more details about the distribution of regular public school districts by grade span.