The most common name in American public education is Lincoln Elementary
Across roughly 101,000 operating US public schools, the single most common name is Lincoln Elementary, carried by 200 schools in 33 states. It is followed by Washington Elementary (144 schools), Central Elementary (130), and Jefferson Elementary (125). The honest-roll of dead presidents continues down the list: Roosevelt, Madison, McKinley, Wilson, Grant, Jackson, Monroe, and Adams all appear inside the top 50.
Even so, repeated names are the exception, not the rule. The country's public schools carry 78,644 distinct names, and the ten most common names together account for fewer than 1,000 schools, under 1% of the total. Most schools are named for a local street, neighborhood, donor, or person, and that name appears nowhere else in the country.
Presidents, places, and virtues
Three naming traditions dominate the top of the list. The first is presidents and founders: Lincoln, Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt, Madison, and the rest, overwhelmingly attached to elementary schools built during the early- and mid-twentieth-century expansion of public education. The second is geography and direction: Central, North, South, East, West, Highland, Fairview, Mountain View, Riverside, and Valley View, generic by design and easy to reuse in any district. The third is civic virtue: Liberty, Heritage, Pioneer, and Union.
The pattern shifts by grade level. Among high schools the most common name is Central High (66 schools), reflecting the era when a town had exactly one high school at its center. Directional names (West High, East High) and a handful of presidents round out the high-school list, but the presidential dominance of the elementary ranking fades.
How the names were counted
Raw school names contain a lot of cosmetic variation that hides genuinely identical names. The same school might be filed as "Lincoln Elementary," "Lincoln Elementary School," "Lincoln Elem," or "LINCOLN ELEMENTARY" depending on the state's reporting conventions. Before counting, names are normalized: surrounding and internal whitespace is collapsed, a redundant trailing "School" is dropped, the level abbreviations Elem, ES, MS, HS, Jr, and Sr are expanded to full words, and matching is done case-insensitively while preserving the most common original spelling for display. That normalization is what merges those four variants into a single Lincoln Elementary with 200 schools behind it.
The figures cover operating public schools in the NCES Common Core of Data SY 2024-25 universe with reported enrollment above zero. Closed schools and zero-enrollment administrative records are excluded. The full top-100 table is below and downloadable as a CSV.