Characteristics of the 100 Largest Public Elementary and Secondary School Districts in the United States: 2003–04
NCES 2006-329
September 2006

Introduction

The purpose of this publication is to provide basic descriptive information about the 100 largest school districts (ranked by student membership, that is, the number of students enrolled at the beginning of the school year) for the 2003–04 school year in the 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Department of Defense, and the four outlying areas (American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Marianas, and the U.S. Virgin Islands). In this report, the term “United States and jurisdictions” refers to these entities. This is different from most National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) reports, which include only the 50 states and the District of Columbia in the totals.

Almost one in four public school students in the United States and jurisdictions is served by one of the 100 largest school districts (table 1). These districts are distinct from all school districts by characteristics other than just the size of their membership, such as average school size, median pupil/teacher ratio, and minority enrollment as a proportion of total enrollment (tables 1 and 2).

In this report, the terms “public school districts,” “school districts,” and “regular schools districts” are used interchangeably. These districts are a subset of local education agencies (LEAs), which include regular school districts; local supervisory unions that provide management services for a group of associated school districts; regional education service agencies that typically provide school districts with research, testing, and data processing services; state and federally operated agencies; and other agencies that do not fall into these groupings (e.g., charter schools reported as their own school districts). A “regular school district” is an agency responsible for providing free public education for school-age children residing within its jurisdiction. All of the 100 largest districts are regular school districts.

Information about the characteristics listed above is found in the tables that accompany this report. To establish a meaningful context for the information on the 100 largest districts, four tables in this section (tables 1–4) provide national data and data for the 100 largest school districts; table 1 and 2 also include data for the 500 largest districts. Appendix A presents basic data tables.  Appendix D (tables D-1 to D-4) provides supplementary information about the 100 and 500 largest districts and the 100 largest school districts in 1993–94. Table D-1 lists the 500 largest school districts with some identifying information. Table D-2 is an alphabetic list of the 500 largest districts that includes their rank by membership size. Table D-3 provides a count of the number of 100 largest districts by state. Table D-4 provides selected data for the 100 largest school districts in the 1993–94 school year for comparison with the 2003–04 school year. In all tables, with the exception of tables D-2 and D-3, districts are presented in decreasing order of membership size.