Introduction

The purpose of this publication is to provide basic descriptive information about the 100 largest school districts (ranked by student membership, that is, the number of students enrolled at the beginning of the school year) for the 2004–05 school year in the 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, the Bureau of Indian Education, the Department of Defense dependents schools (overseas and domestic), and the four outlying areas (American Samoa, Guam, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, and the U.S. Virgin Islands). In this report, the terms "United States and jurisdictions" and "national total data" refer to these entities. This is different from most National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) reports, which include only the 50 states and the District of Columbia in the totals.

Almost one in four public school students in the United States and jurisdictions is served by one of the 100 largest school districts (table 1). These districts are distinct from all school districts by characteristics other than just the size of their membership. They also vary by average school size, median pupil/teacher ratio, and minority enrollment as a proportion of total enrollment (tables 1 and 2).

In this report, the terms "public school districts" and "school districts" are used interchangeably. These include regular school districts; local supervisory unions that provide management services for a group of associated school districts; regional education service agencies that typically provide school districts with research, testing, and data processing services; state and federally operated agencies; and other agencies that do not fall into these groupings (e.g., charter schools reported as their own school districts). A "regular school district," a subset of "public school districts" or "school districts," is an agency responsible for providing free public education for school-age children residing within its jurisdiction. All of the 100 largest districts are regular school districts.

Information about the characteristics listed above is found in the tables that accompany this report. To establish a meaningful context for the information on the 100 largest districts, four tables in this section (tables 1–4) provide national data and data for the 100 largest school districts; tables 1 and 2 also include data for the 500 largest districts. Appendix A presents basic data tables for the 100 largest school districts. Appendix D (tables D-1 to D-4) provides supplementary information about the 100 and 500 largest school districts. Table D-1 lists the 500 largest school districts with some identifying information. Table D-2 is an alphabetic list of the 500 largest districts that includes their rank by membership size. Table D-3 provides a count of the number of 100 largest districts by state. Table D-4 provides selected data for the 100 largest school districts in the 1994–95 school year for comparison with the 2004–05 school year. In all tables, with the exception of tables D-2 and D-3, districts are presented in decreasing order of membership size.

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