Schools with Lowest Student-Teacher Ratio

Student-teacher ratio (STR) is a structural metric every U.S. public school reports through the NCES Common Core of Data: it\'s the number of full-time-equivalent classroom teachers divided into total enrollment. The Department of Education\'s EDFacts collection adds proficiency context, and the Urban Institute Education Data API wraps both for programmatic access.

The 100 schools below carry the lowest reported student-teacher ratios in our dataset. By level the list breaks down to 6 elementary, 3 middle, 91 high, and 0 configured as Other. The median ratio is 0.3:1, and an unusually small ratio of 0.

This page sorts schools by student-teacher ratio, computed by NCES from full-time-equivalent classroom teacher counts and total enrollment. A low ratio does not automatically mean small classes — the figure includes specialists, push-in teachers, and pull-out programs — but it does correlate with how much adult attention is available per pupil.

STR is not the same as average class size. NCES counts every full-time-equivalent classroom teacher, including specialists, intervention teachers, ESL push-in teachers, and special-education resource teachers — none of whom lead a typical homeroom. So a school with a 10:1 STR can have 27 students in its general-education 4th-grade classroom because the count includes the school\'s reading specialist, its math interventionist, and a part-time gifted-and-talented teacher.

A very low ratio at the top of this list is more often a signal of school type than of generous staffing. Amtech Career Academy (Amarillo, TX) posts 0.1:1, which an unusually small ratio of 0.1:1 is most often seen at specialty schools (special education, alternative, virtual academies) where the headcount and the staffing model are deliberately different from a comprehensive neighborhood campus. For families evaluating a comprehensive neighborhood school, mid-single-digit ratios are usually not what they appear to be in raw form.

For schools in the 9-15 range, the ratio is more interpretable. A 12:1 elementary school with healthy enrollment likely runs smaller homerooms, has more classroom support staff per pupil, and has greater capacity for differentiated instruction than a 22:1 school. The class-size literature — Project STAR, the Tennessee STAR follow-ups, and the Brookings analyses of California\'s 1996 reforms — broadly supports the idea that smaller classes help, especially in early grades and especially for low-income students.

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.

We pull every school with a positive student-teacher ratio in NCES CCD, sort ascending, and keep the top 100. We do not adjust for school type — special-education and alternative schools are not excluded, because their ratios are real and meaningful in their own context. Read the full methodology page for field definitions and refresh cadence.