Two million fewer students, 40,000 more teachers
Public schools in 43 states and Puerto Rico enrolled 1,993,876 fewer students in 2024-25 than they did in 2017-18. Over the same seven years, those schools reported about 40,200 more teachers.
Enrollment fell 5.2 percent. Teacher counts rose 1.7 percent. The student-to-teacher ratio went from 16.3 to 15.2.
The comparison covers 71,888 schools that appear in both federal collections, so opening and closing schools cannot move the totals. For those, see school closures since 2017 and the schools that lost half their students.
Louisiana moved furthest
Louisiana posted the largest change of any state. Its schools lost 5.7 percent of their students and reported 22.7 percent more teachers, cutting the ratio from 17.9 to 13.7. New Mexico followed, going from 15.8 to 13.0 on an 8.5 percent increase in teachers.
California starts from the most crowded position of any large state and got there differently. Its ratio fell from 23.5 to 21.5 on a 9.8 percent enrollment drop, with teacher counts down 1.7 percent. The classrooms emptied faster than the staff left.
North Carolina and Alaska ended more crowded
Two states finished the period worse than they started.
North Carolina lost 4.1 percent of its students and 6.5 percent of its teachers, pushing its ratio from 15.7 to 16.1. Alaska saw the sharpest reversal in the country: enrollment was flat, within a tenth of a percent of where it started, while teacher counts fell 8.7 percent. Its ratio went from 17.3 to 18.9.
The pattern holds school by school
Of the 46,947 schools in this set that lost students, 16,736 added teachers anyway. That is 35.6 percent of shrinking schools staffing up while their enrollment fell.
Most of the enrollment loss landed in the youngest grades. Elementary schools lost 7.9 percent of their students and added 1.0 percent more teachers. Middle schools lost 7.3 percent and held staffing flat. High schools barely shrank at all, down 1.3 percent, and added 2.1 percent more teachers.
What these numbers do not settle
A falling ratio does not mean a school is fully staffed. A school that loses 80 students and one teacher improves on this measure while still carrying a vacancy it cannot fill. Federal counts record positions districts reported filling. They say nothing about turnover, long-term substitutes, or how long a job sat open.
The ratio also runs higher than the class size any single teacher sees, because specialists, coaches, and part-time staff all sit in the denominator. It works for comparing states and years against each other, not for describing one room. Schools ranked on current staffing are at highest student-teacher ratios and lowest student-teacher ratios.
Methodology
Figures come from the National Center for Education Statistics Common Core of Data, comparing the 2017-18 and 2024-25 collections. The set is limited to schools appearing in both years with a reported teacher count above zero and enrollment above zero. States with fewer than 150 such schools are not ranked.
Seven jurisdictions are excluded: Florida, Nevada, New York, Indiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, and the District of Columbia. Each shows a single-step change in reported teacher counts between the 2017-18 and 2022-23 collections of more than 6 percent, with every school in the state moving at once. Florida's reported count drops 13.9 percent in that one step and then holds steady for the next two collections. A shift that uniform reflects a change in what a state reports rather than a change in who it employs, and leaving those states in would distort both the national total and the ranking.