New York City runs the largest public school system in the US, with 827,219 students in 1,592 schools in 2024-25. Los Angeles Unified is second at 406,717, about half New York's size.
Miami-Dade County Public Schools (335,631 students), Chicago Public Schools (324,130), and Nevada's Clark County School District, which includes Las Vegas (301,622), complete the top five. Those five districts teach 2,195,319 students between them.
The full list of 100 enrolls 10,406,136 students, or 21.1 percent of the 49,343,524 in federal data for 2024-25. The last district to make it, Frederick County Public Schools in Maryland, has 48,054.
Texas and Florida each place 18 districts in the top 100, more than any other state. Florida runs its schools through countywide districts, and six of them land in the top 20. Texas gets there with big-city districts such as Houston ISD and Dallas ISD and with suburban ones around Houston, including Cypress-Fairbanks, Katy, Fort Bend, and Conroe.
Most of these systems have fewer students than they did seven years ago. Comparing the same schools in 2017-18 and 2024-25, enrollment fell in 82 of the 100 districts. As a group, those schools lost 8.4 percent of their students. Across every public school open in both years, the drop was 5.1 percent.
Puerto Rico's island-wide Department of Education fell the most, 22.9 percent. Albuquerque Public Schools lost 20.4 percent, Los Angeles Unified 20.3 percent, Fort Worth ISD 17.0 percent, and Houston ISD 16.1 percent. New York City's schools lost 14.1 percent, about 134,000 students.
Eighteen districts grew. IDEA Public Schools, a charter network that Texas counts as a single district, added 17.5 percent at the schools it already ran in 2017-18, and its total enrollment more than doubled as it opened new ones. Nevada's state-sponsored charter schools, which also report as one district, grew 14.9 percent. Among traditional districts, St. Lucie County in Florida (12.1 percent), Frederick County in Maryland (9.0 percent), and Horry County in South Carolina (8.4 percent) grew fastest.
Ranked by number of schools instead of students, the order changes; see the districts with the most schools. Every district is also ranked on poverty, diversity, and test scores in the district rankings, and the school closures report covers the buildings that shut over the same seven years.
How we counted
Enrollment comes from the National Center for Education Statistics Common Core of Data for 2024-25, summed across every operating school a district reports. A district here is a federal local education agency, so a charter school counts toward a district only when the state files it under that district, as Florida does.
New York City reports to the federal government as 33 districts: 32 geographic community school districts and District 75, which serves students with disabilities. The city's Department of Education runs all 33, so they are combined into one row. Independent charter schools in the city are not included.
The change since 2017-18 counts only schools that appear in both years with students enrolled, so openings, closings, and schools that moved to another district ID do not move the number. That matters most in Los Angeles: 234 schools listed under Los Angeles Unified's federal ID in 2017-18, with 115,077 students, no longer appear under it. Counted by district ID alone, Los Angeles would show a 34 percent drop.
Source: National Center for Education Statistics, Common Core of Data, public school files for 2017-18 and 2024-25.