School District

How It Works

There are approximately 13,000 traditional school districts in the United States, ranging from tiny rural districts with fewer than 100 students to massive urban districts serving hundreds of thousands. The New York City Department of Education is the largest, with over 1 million students and 1,800 schools. Los Angeles Unified, Chicago Public Schools, and Miami-Dade County round out the top four. School districts are responsible for hiring and paying teachers, setting curricula (within state standards), managing school facilities, providing transportation, administering budgets, and complying with state and federal education laws. Districts receive funding from local taxes (primarily property taxes), state aid (distributed through formulas that typically account for student enrollment, poverty levels, and special needs), and federal grants (primarily Title I and IDEA). District quality varies enormously, and the district a child attends is one of the strongest predictors of educational outcomes in the United States. High-performing districts typically feature stable leadership, strong teacher recruitment and retention, coherent curricula, data-driven instruction, and adequate and equitably distributed resources. On OpenSchoolData, every school is linked to its district, and district pages aggregate performance data across all schools to show district-level trends, grade distributions, and comparisons.

Related Terms

• Per-Pupil Spending, The total amount of money a school or district spends divided by the number of enrolled students, used to compare resource levels across schools and states.
• School Accountability, The system by which schools and districts are held responsible for student outcomes, including state ratings, improvement plans, and potential interventions for chronically low-performing schools.
• Title I, A federal program providing supplemental funding to schools with high percentages of students from low-income families, serving approximately 25 million students in over 56,000 schools.
• Teacher-Student Ratio, The number of students per full-time-equivalent teacher at a school, often used as a proxy for class size and resource allocation, though the two measures are not identical.