• Types of Public Schools
• Schools and Community Size
• Primary, Middle, and High Schools
• School District Grade Spans
• School District Size
• Student Characteristics
• Dropouts

In the 1996-97 school year, 86,058 public schools provided instruction to 45.6 million students in the United States (table 1).¹This was an increase of 1.7 percent over the previous year for students and 1.1 percent in the number of schools.²Most of these institutions were regular schools (81,163). Regular schools often provide a range of special, vocational, and alternative programs in addition to their traditional curriculum offerings; however, in 1996-97 there were 4,895 schools that offered these specialized programs as their primary function. Among this group were 1,686 schools whose major function was to provide special education for students with disabilities and 335 schools identified as vocational. Some 2,874 schools were reported to offer other alternative programs.

Table 1. (click here)

The great majority of public school students, 98.2 percent, were enrolled in regular schools. An additional 0.5 percent were in special education schools, 0.4 percent in vocational schools, and 0.9 percent in alternative schools. These distributions were unchanged from the previous year. Georgia, Mississippi, and North Dakota reported no special schools. With 7.7 percent of its pupils enrolled in nonregular schools, Delaware had the greatest proportion of students in these specialized settings.

Table 2 shows that while one in eight schools was located in a large city, one in six students attended large city schools. There were about the same number of schools in rural areas and the urban fringes of large cities: about one in four. However, urban fringes of large cities accounted for twice as many students as did rural schools.

Among the 86,058 public schools with students in membership during the 1996-97 school year, 59.1 percent spanned the traditional primary grades, typically beginning with prekindergarten or kindergarten and going no higher than grade 8 (table 3). About half (50.5 percent) of the nation's public school students were enrolled in these schools. An additional 17.2 percent of the schools covered the upper elementary and middle grades and offered instruction to 19.5 percent of public school students.

Table 3. (click here)

High schools represented 18.8 percent of the schools reported and enrolled 26.9 percent of the total number of students. About 4.9 percent of schools followed some other grade configuration, including schools that spanned all of grades kindergarten through 12 and those that were ungraded.

In 1996-97, there were 14,990 public education agencies providing education services directly to students in the United States. Some of these were operated directly by states or federal agencies, or had a primary role other than that of administering regular education services. However, the majority of public education agencies (14,422) were regular school districts providing education to children within their jurisdiction (table 4).

Table 4. (click here)

States vary in the organization of their regular education agencies. Hawaii and the District of Columbia each consist of a single school district. Sixteen other states reported 100 percent of their students in comprehensive K-12 districts. On the other hand, Arizona, Illinois, Montana, and Vermont reported less than two-thirds of their students in comprehensive school districts.

Among the 14,422 regular school districts with pupils in membership, 3,161 were responsible for only the elementary grades, beginning with grades prekindergarten, kindergarten, or 1 and ending at grade 8 or below (table 4). These districts enrolled 5.9 percent of the nation's public school students. An additional 548 agencies could be characterized as secondary school districts, with a low grade of 7 or higher and a high grade of 12. Some 2.3 percent of all students attended schools in these districts. An additional 171 districts had some other configuration. However, almost three out of four districts (10,542) provided instruction from the beginning of school through graduation. Fully 91.6 percent of all students were enrolled in these comprehensive school districts.

School districts varied greatly in size, as measured by the number of students in membership. A very few districts (24) enrolled 100,000 or more students, while a larger number (1,725) reported fewer than 150 students (table 5). While small in number, the largest districts served a considerable portion of America's public school students. Although only 1.6 percent of districts served 25,000 or more students, fully 31.1 percent of students received their education in these largest districts. To show the contrast from a different perspective, almost half of the school districts in the United States had fewer than 1,000 students in 1996-97. At the same time, almost half of the public school students in this country attended schools in districts of 10,000 students or more.

Because participation in the Free Lunch Program depends on income, eligibility for this program is often used to estimate student needs. Eight states did not report free lunch eligibility data for at least 70 percent of their schools, so national totals could not be calculated. Within those states and schools that did provide this information, the proportion of students who were reported as eligible to receive free lunch ranged from a low of 12.4 percent in New Hampshire to a high of 69.3 percent in the District of Columbia. In all, eight states reported that 40 percent or more of their public school students were eligible for free lunch (table 6).

Table 6. (click here)

Two states did not report the number of students with individual education programs (IEPs), who participate in special education services. Among the states for which this information was available, the percentage of students with IEPs ranged from less than 5 percent in Michigan and Ohio to 15 percent or more in Massachusetts, Missouri, Rhode Island, and West Virginia.

About two-thirds of the public school students in the United States in 1996-97 were white, non-Hispanic, and about one-sixth were black, non-Hispanic. American Indian-Alaska Native students constituted about one-fourth of the student membership in Alaska, while almost two-thirds of the students in Hawaii were in the Asian-Pacific Islander category. About one in seven students nationwide was Hispanic. More than one-third of the students were Hispanic in California, New Mexico, and Texas. Over half of the students were black, non-Hispanic in the District of Columbia (87.3 percent) and Mississippi (50.9 percent). White, non-Hispanic students made up less than half of the student membership in six states, but represented 90 percent or more of the students in five other states. At the national level, none of the racial-ethnic groups changed by as much as 1 percent over the previous year.

Twenty-nine states and Puerto Rico reported dropout statistics in agreement with the required definition (table 7).³Among these jurisdictions, Louisiana reported that more than 10 percent of students in grades 9 through 12 had dropped out during the preceding school year. North Dakota, South Carolina, and Puerto Rico reported dropout rates among these grades at less than 3 percent. Fourteen states had dropout rates somewhere between 4 and 6 percent. Dropouts were more likely to be male than female. In fact, only in Utah were less than 55 percent of the grade 9-12 dropouts male. In seven states, half or more of the dropouts were minority students, that is, other than white, non-Hispanic.

¹ Although the outlying areas and the Department of Defense Dependents Schools (overseas) are included in the tables, national totals are limited to the 50 states and the District of Columbia.

² Comparisons are based on the previous edition of this Statistics in Brief, which covered the 1995-96 school year: Overview of Public Elementary and Secondary Schools and Districts: School Year 1995-96 (NCES 98-206).

³ A dropout was defined as a student who was enrolled at any time during 1995-96, was not enrolled at the beginning of 1996-97, and had not graduated or transferred to another school.