AS&U 100
U.S. public school enrollment declined slightly in 2023-24, and those smaller numbers are reflected in the AS&U 100 list of the nation’s largest districts.
The 100 largest districts range from New York City, with 1,058,061 students in 2023-24, to the Horry County (South Carolina) district, with 48,205 students. Each of those school systems had small year-to-year enrollment increases, but they were the exception—65 of the 100 largest districts reported lower enrollment in 2023-24 than the previous school year. In the aggregate, the 100 districts enrolled 10,684,000 students in 2023-24, about 26,000 fewer than the 10,710,000 students enrolled in 2022-23.
The overall decline in enrollment follows two years of modest increases as schools recovered from the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. Public school enrollment rose gradually each year from 2011-12 through 2019-20, when nearly 50.8 million were attending U.S. public schools. Covid-19 shut down schools in March 2020 and the ongoing effects on school operations were reflected in a nationwide drop of more than 1.4 million when students were counted in 2020-21.
Numbers rose slightly in 2021-22 and 2022-23; the National Center for Education Statistics reported 49,618,464 public school students in 2022-23, but the 2023-24 number dropped to 49,516,361.
The data for the AS&U 100 are collected from state departments of education, individual districts and the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). In some cases, numbers from one source do not agree with another source because of differences in how the figures are calculated (e.g., the date used to determine a year’s enrollment, or whether charter school numbers are included in a district’s overall enrollment.)
Covid consequences
The 2023-24 enrollment decline raises some questions: Is it a lingering effect of the Covid-19 pandemic? Does it reflect an inevitable drop that was anticipated even before the pandemic because of a slowing nationwide birth rate? Or did the response to the Covid19 pandemic bring about a more permanent change in public school enrollment, as more families decided to homeschool their children or send them to private or charter schools?
The Brookings Institution, in an August 2025 report on declining public school enrollment, looks at those questions.
“The Covid-19 pandemic forced millions of families to rethink where and how their children learn, and the effects continue to reshape American K-12 education,” the report states.
Projections of future enrollment growth suggest that even if families’ schooling decisions return to pre-pandemic habits, the expected overall population decline will reduce public school student numbers in 2050 by 2.2 million.
“If, however, parents keep choosing alternatives at the pace observed since 2020, traditional public schools could lose as many as 8.5 million students,” the report says.
The projected enrollment declines raise two distinct concerns, the Brookings researchers say.
“Students who exit public schools often move into settings that are less regulated and more variable in performance,” the report says. “Those who remain in shrinking districts inherit tighter budgets because state and federal aid is generally tied to enrollment.”
On the other hand, some trends that grew in popularity during the pandemic, like homeschooling, may wane in the coming years.
“Homeschooling demands intense parental effort, and as more adults return to on-site work, some families may decide that public schools once again offer the most practical option,” the report says.
Counting by county
How a school district has been formed goes a long way in determining whether its enrollment is large enough to appear on the list. More than half of the districts on the 2023-24 list are countywide school systems—that’s why five of the nation’s 10 largest districts are in Florida.
Florida has 67 counties and had 2.87 million students in 2023-24 in its 67 school districts. In comparison, Illinois, which has a mix of elementary districts, high school districts and unit (K-12) districts, has a million fewer students than Florida, but spreads them across 851 school districts. So only the Chicago school system makes the AS&U 100 from Illinois.
Los Angeles Unified is already the second largest school district in the United States, but if its boundaries covered all of Los Angeles County, it would be the nation’s largest, with 1.3 million students.
The nation’s three largest states—California, Texas and Florida—also have the most districts appearing on the AS&U100. Florida and Texas each have 18, and California has 10. Twenty-six states have no school systems large enough to appear on the list.
Looking back
The list of the largest districts doesn’t change much from year to year. Only two of the 100 districts—Lake County in Florida and Horry County in South Carolina—are different from the school systems on last year’s list. But if one goes back 25 years, many urban districts large enough to appear in1998-99 have seen their enrollment decline significantly. Among those: New Orleans, Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, Minneapolis, St. Paul, St. Louis, Oakland, Sacramento, Portland, and Tucson.
Over the years, they have been supplanted by school districts in steadily growing suburban areas, especially in states like Texas and Florida. Five of the Texas districts in this year’s AS&U 100—Humble, Cypress-Fairbanks, Conroe, Katy and Frisco—have more than doubled their enrollment since 1998-99. Frisco, north of Dallas, which had 4,473 students in 1998-99, was nearly 15 times larger in2023-24, with an enrollment of 66,698.
Fewer and larger
None of Vermont’s 119 school districts is close to appearing on the AS&U 100—the entire state’s public school enrollment is less than 84,000, and it has only one district with more than 4,000 students. Declining enrollment, rising costs and funding inequities have persuaded lawmakers that the existing system is not sustainable.
So the state has created a School District Redistricting Task Force. Its marching orders are to recommend to the legislature up to three potential configurations that would reduce the number of districts from 119 to somewhere between 10 and 25, each of which would have enrollments of between 4,000 and 8,000. Lawmakers would decide in 2026 on the new districts, and they would go into operation in the 2028-29 school year.
“Having bigger districts and fewer superintendent offices is critical to getting more of the money we invest in education to be spent on our kids in their classrooms,” Vermont Gov. Phil Scott said after the task force was established. “Right now, from town to town and district to district, our system is not equitable. This reform will give us an opportunity to change that, if we stay focused on the fundamentals and follow through.”
Vermont’s push for consolidation follows a longstanding trend of creating larger school systems. NCES statistics show that the United States had 117,108 school districts in 1939-40; in 2023-24, that number had plummeted to about 13,300. But in some cases, the change occurs in the opposite direction, and a district is divided into smaller entities.
That what’s happening in Utah’s largest school system, the 87,000-student Alpine district. Voters decided last year that the school system had become too big and opted to divide it into three smaller systems that would be more responsive to constituents.
Carving up a larger district into smaller units has happened before in Utah. In 2007, part of the Jordan district, which at the time was the state’s largest with about 80,000 students, split away to form the Canyons district. The new district began operating in 2009 with about 33,600 students; the Jordan district’s student numbers dropped to about 48,800 that year.
[sidebar with higher ed chart]
Online has the numbers in higher education
Higher education institutions with thriving online programs continue to dominate the top of the list of U.S. colleges and universities with the largest enrollments.
The five postsecondary schools that had the most students enrolled in fall 2023 primarily offer online programs. Western Governors University, based in Salt Lake City, Utah, tops the list with 185,015 students, an increase of more than 28,000 compared with fall 2022. Southern New Hampshire University, based in Manchester, was a close second with 184,099 students. That’s 20,000 more than its fall 2022 number.
The only year-to-year change among the 25 colleges and universities with the largest enrollments was the addition of the University of Arizona in Tucson. With 53,001 students in fall 2023, it placed 22nd on the list and replaced Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, which was 25th on the fall 2022 list.
Overall, the National Center for Education Statistics reported overall higher education enrollment in fall 2023 was about 19.4 million, a 2.5% increase over the 18.9 million enrolled in fall 2022.