Largest Elementary Schools in America

This list ranks the 100 largest US public elementary schools by total enrollment from the NCES Common Core of Data (CCD), the federal database of every public school in the country. Where available, we pair each school with the district-level proficiency rate from EDFacts, the U.S. Department of Education collection that aggregates state-reported assessment results. For researchers who want the underlying tables in a programmable form, the Urban Institute Education Data API wraps the same files.

Florida Virtual Elementary School in Orlando, FL enrolls 2,600 students, well above the U.S. median for its level and large enough that staffing, scheduling, and bus logistics differ in kind from smaller schools. It tops a list where the top-ten elementary schools all enroll over 1,720 students.

This page sorts schools by total enrollment as reported in the most recent NCES Common Core of Data release. We do not score, weight, or grade these schools — large enrollment is a description of campus size, not of education quality. Two equally good elementary schools can have very different enrollments because of district boundaries, building capacity, or grade-band configuration.

NCES classifies a campus as Elementary when its highest grade is 5th. These schools focus on foundational literacy and numeracy; EDFacts proficiency rates here mostly reflect 3rd-5th grade testing.

Among the 100 elementary schools listed, 100 have a published EDFacts proficiency rate. The most common reason a row shows N/A is that the school sits in a district whose rate was suppressed for privacy or wasn\'t reported in the most recent EDFacts file. Where rates do appear, the median is roughly typical for U.S. districts — a district-level rate close to the national middle, where roughly half of tested students reach grade-level standards on EDFacts assessments.

A large campus at the top of this list is not interchangeable with a smaller campus posting similar test scores. Building scale changes the staffing model, the principal\'s span of control, the cafeteria and recess logistics, and how much one-on-one time a kindergartener gets with a classroom teacher. Parents evaluating an elementary school should look at enrollment alongside the published student-teacher ratio, the school\'s grade range (a K-5 reads very differently from a K-8), and whether the district\'s overall proficiency rate is rising or falling year over year.

A few honest caveats: EDFacts proficiency and graduation rates are reported at the district level, not the individual school. We apply the district number to every school in that district so that the comparison is at least consistent — but a strong school inside a struggling district will look worse than it is, and vice versa. NCES publishes the most recent year of CCD data with about a one-year lag. Privacy suppression hides results for very small subgroups, which appears as missing data rather than zero.

The full school profile pages on this site link out to each school\'s NCES School Locator entry, which is the federal record of record. For deeper digging into demographics and revenue, researchers can use the Urban Institute\'s wrapper of the same data.

We built this ranking by pulling every school flagged as Elementary in the most recent NCES CCD release, sorting by total enrollment, and trimming the list to the top 100. Schools with reported enrollment of zero or with missing classification flags are excluded. We do not modify the federal numbers; we display them as published. Read the full methodology page for the complete data lineage and update cadence.