Student-Teacher Ratio
The number of students enrolled in a school district for each full-time-equivalent teacher it employs.
On this page
The number of students enrolled in a school district for each full-time-equivalent teacher the district employs.
Both inputs come from the Common Core of Data, the annual NCES collection covering "all public elementary and secondary schools and school districts" (About CCD). The nonfiscal component provides "State-level student membership counts disaggregated by grade, race/ethnicity and sex", "Teacher FTE counts" and "Staff FTE counts by professional category" (CCD data files). Staff are counted as full-time equivalents, reported to the nearest tenth, so two half-time teachers count as one.
A student-teacher ratio is not a class size. It divides a district's whole enrollment by its whole teaching staff, and teachers who do not lead a general classroom — special education, intervention, and specialist staff — are in the denominator. Actual class sizes in a district are normally larger than its student-teacher ratio.
Metrics in this family#
Student-teacher ratio
Enrollment per full-time-equivalent teacher in the district's most recent reported school year, 2024-25.
Student-teacher ratio, one-year change
The change in that ratio over one year, from school year 2023-24 to 2024-25, expressed as a percentage change. Only these two school years are loaded, so no longer window is available.
Considerations#
Staff counts are reported by states to the Department, and NCES notes that not all states are able to report every staff category. Where a district reports enrollment but no teaching staff, or reports less than one full-time-equivalent teacher because the post is shared with another district, no ratio is shown: dividing a full enrollment by a fraction of a person does not describe how many students that teacher serves.
Districts vary enormously in size. In a district of a few hundred students, one teacher leaving or arriving moves the ratio noticeably, and the one-year change is correspondingly noisy. Read single-year movement in small districts with care.
The ratio counts staff employed by the district, on a district-wide basis. It says nothing about how those teachers are distributed between schools, and a district with a favourable average can contain schools well away from it.
This is a district-level figure displayed on a census tract. It describes the district covering that tract, not the tract. It covers public schools only; private and home-schooled enrollment is outside the collection.
References#
- 1About CCDhttps://nces.ed.gov/ccd/aboutccd.asp
- 2CCD data fileshttps://nces.ed.gov/ccd/files.asp