This Is America’s Largest School District

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Aug 10, 10:30AM EDT

This Is America’s Largest School District — © fernandogarciaesteban / iStock Editorial via Getty Images

Some school districts are at war over COVID-19 protection measures with the cities and states in which they are located. The Dallas Independent School District will require masks, in defiance of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s “ban on mask” mandate. Gov. Ron DeSantis announced the State Board of Education may cut pay to officials in some Florida school districts if they make masks a requirement.

School districts can be huge, in terms of the number of students that attend their schools. Several have student populations in the hundreds of thousands, which means that decisions about health affect not only these students, but teachers, administrators, parents and other relatives in the hundreds of thousands as well. School districts are on the front line of the war over the COVID-19 restrictions and the spread of the disease.

As might be expected, the largest school districts are in the largest cities. Some of them, however, are independent of these cities and make their own decisions about matters like curriculum and health.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, in 2019, the three largest cities in America by population also had the largest school districts based on number of students enrolled.
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America’s largest district is New York City’s, with 976,771 students. The population of children 5 to 17 years old in the district is 1,237,149. Clearly many of these children do not attend public school.

The second-largest district is in America’s second-largest city. Los Angeles’s school district has 621,414 students, while the population of children 5 years to 17 years old is 707,609.

The third-largest school district is in the third-largest city. The number of students in Chicago is 373,700. All children ages 5 to 17 within the district number 402,830.

Click here to see which is the worst school district in each state.
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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.