• Types of Public Schools
• Schools With Students in Membership
• Schools and Community Size
• Primary, Middle, and High Schools
• School District Grade Spans
• School District Size
• Student Characteristics
• Dropouts
• Reference

In the 1997-98 school year, the 50 states and the District of Columbia reported almost 90,000 public schools. Most of these were regular schools, which offer a comprehensive curriculum and may provide a range of other programs and services as well. Considerably smaller numbers of schools focused primarily on special education, vocational/technical or career education, or alternative programs. Students in these specialized schools are often also enrolled in a regular school and reported only in the membership of that regular school.

Only those schools that reported membership are included in the following discussion and tables.

In the 1997-98 school year, 87,631 public schools provided instruction to 46.1 million students in the United States (table 1).¹ This was an increase of about 1.2 percent from the previous year's 45.6 million students and a gain of 1.8 percent from the 86,058 schools in 1996-97.² Most of these 1997-98 school-year institutions were regular schools (82,127). Among the total number of schools for which student membership was reported were 1,764 schools whose major function was to provide special education for students with disabilities and 360 identified as vocational, technical, or career schools. Some 3,380 schools were reported to offer other alternative programs. While this is a relatively small number, there are one-sixth again as many of these schools as there were last year.

The great majority of public school students, 98.1 percent, were enrolled in regular schools. An additional 0.5 percent were in special education schools, 0.4 percent in vocational schools, and 1.0 percent in alternative schools. These distributions were unchanged from the previous year. Mississippi, New Hampshire, and North Dakota reported only regular schools. With 8.1 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, schools in cities' urban fringes accounted for twice as many students as did rural schools.

Among the 87,631 public schools with students in membership during the 1997-98 school year, about 58.5 percent spanned the traditional primary grades, typically beginning with prekindergarten or kindergarten and going no higher than grade 8 (table 3). About half (50.1 percent) of the nation's public school students were enrolled in these schools. An additional 17.3 percent of the schools covered the upper elementary and middle grades and offered instruction to 19.6 percent of public school students.

High schools represented 18.9 percent of the schools reported and enrolled 27.1 percent of the total number of students. About 5.3 percent of schools followed some other grade configuration, including schools that spanned all of grades kindergarten through 12 and those that were ungraded.

In 1997-98, there were 15,035 public education agencies providing education services directly to students in the United States. Some 608 of these were operated directly by state or federal agencies, or had a primary role other than that of administering regular educational services. However, the majority of public education agencies (14,427) were regular school districts providing education to children within their jurisdiction (table 4).

States vary in the organization of their regular education agencies. Hawaii and the District of Columbia each consist of a single K-12 school district. Sixteen other states also reported 100 percent of their students enrolled in comprehensive K-12 school districts. On the other hand, in Montana and Vermont less than one-third of the students were served in this type of school district.

Among the 14,427 regular school districts with pupils in membership, 3,153 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 557 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 137 districts had some other grade configuration. However, almost three out of four districts (10,580) provided instruction from the beginning of school through graduation. Fully 91.8 percent of all students were enrolled in these comprehensive school districts.

School districts ranged greatly in size, as measured by the number of students in membership. A very few districts (25) enrolled 100,000 or more students, while a larger number (1,738) reported fewer than 150 students (table 5). While small in number, the largest districts served a considerable portion of students in America's public schools. Although only 1.6 percent of districts served 25,000 or more students, fully 31.5 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 1997-98. At the same time, about 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. Nine states did not report free lunch eligibility data for at least 70 percent of their schools, so national totals could not be calculated (table 6). Within those states and schools that did provide this information, the proportion of students who were reported as eligible to receive a free lunch ranged from a low of 11.3 percent in New Hampshire to a high of 55.6 percent in Mississippi. (The District of Columbia had an eligibility rate of 69.3 percent in the previous year, but did not report these data in 1997-98.)

Nationally, about one in every eight students was reported to have an individualized education program (IEP), meaning that they participate in special education services. The percentage of students with IEPs ranged from 4.1 percent in Michigan to 17.7 percent in Rhode Island.

About two-thirds of the public school students in the United States in 1997-98 were white, non-Hispanic, and about one-sixth were black, non-Hispanic. American Indians/Alaska Natives constituted about one in four students in Alaska, while over two-thirds of the students in Hawaii were in the Asian/Pacific Islander category. 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 (87.0 percent) and Mississippi (50.9 percent). White, non-Hispanic students made up less than half of the student membership in six states, and 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 percentage point over the previous year.

Thirty-two states reported dropout statistics in agreement with the Common Core of Data definition (table 7).³ Among these jurisdictions, Louisiana and Nevada reported that more than 10 percent of students in grades 9-12 had dropped out during the preceding school year. Iowa, North Dakota, and South Carolina reported dropout rates among these grades at less than 3 percent. Fifteen of the reporting states, or about half, had dropout rates somewhere between 4.0 and 6.0 percent. Dropouts were more likely to be male than female. In Ohio and South Carolina, at least three out of five of the grade 9-12 dropouts were male. In California, Hawaii, New Mexico, and Texas, which have relatively high proportions of minority enrollments, 70 percent or more of the dropouts were minority students, that is, other than white, non-Hispanic.

Table 1—Number of public elementary and secondary schools with membership and percentage of students in membership, by type of school and by state: School year 1997-98

Table 2—Number and percentage of schools with membership and percentage of students in membership, by community type: School year 1997-98

Table 3—Percentage of public elementary and secondary schools providing instruction and percentage of students in membership, by specified level of instruction and by state: School year 1997-98

Table 4—Number of regular public elementary and secondary school districts providing instruction and percentage of students in membership, by grade span and by state: School year 1997-98

Table 5—Distribution of regular public elementary and secondary school districts and students, by district membership size: School year 1997-98

Table 6—Selected characteristics of public elementary and secondary school membership as a percentage of school membership by state: School year 1997-98

Table 7—Number and percentage of students dropping out of grades 9 through 12 and percentage of dropouts who are male or minority, by reporting states: School year 1996-97