Title I Schools Directory

Title I, Part A is the largest federal K-12 funding stream and dates back to the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act. The 100 schools below are the largest Title I-designated schools in the country by total enrollment from the NCES Common Core of Data. For program details, the Department of Education maintains a Title I, Part A program page. Where the school\'s district has reported assessment results to EDFacts, we display the district-level math and reading proficiency rate. Full underlying data is queryable via the Urban Institute Education Data API.

At 15,223 students, Epic Charter School Elementary (Oklahoma City, OK) is one of the largest schools of any kind in the country — a campus closer in scale to a small college than a typical neighborhood school. It heads a directory where the level mix runs 0 elementary, 1 middle, and 99 high schools.

This page lists the largest schools that carry NCES Title I status. Inclusion is determined entirely by the federal status flag in the Common Core of Data; we do not infer Title I from poverty or free-and-reduced-lunch data.

A school carries a Title I designation when its share of low-income students crosses a federally set threshold and the district elects to participate in the Title I, Part A program. Federal funds flow to the campus to underwrite reading specialists, math interventions, and family engagement work. Title I status is therefore a poverty marker, not a quality score — many of the highest-performing public schools in the country are Title I, and many under-performing schools are not.

Among the listed Title I schools with published EDFacts proficiency, a district-level rate close to the national middle, where roughly half of tested students reach grade-level standards on EDFacts assessments. The dispersion across these schools is wide; aggregate stats hide the fact that some Title I campuses post above-state-average proficiency while others sit in the bottom decile of their state.

Title I schools are not categorically struggling schools, and they are not categorically high-performing schools — they are simply schools serving a higher concentration of low-income students that have elected to participate in federal Title I funding. Decades of education research, including work by Sean Reardon at Stanford and the long-running Equality of Opportunity Project, document that socioeconomic status is the single largest correlate of standardized test scores. That correlation shows up here, but it does not mean a Title I school is failing its students.

For families: knowing a school is Title I tells you it serves more low-income students and has more federal funding for academic interventions and family supports. Whether that translates to a strong educational experience depends on building leadership, teacher quality, and curricular fit — none of which appear in the federal flag itself. 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 filter NCES CCD to schools where the Title I status flag is set, sort by total enrollment, and keep the top 100. We use the federal flag exclusively — we do not infer Title I from free-and-reduced-lunch data or local press accounts. EDFacts proficiency is joined at the district level. Read the full methodology page for update cadence and field definitions.