ÉçÇøºÚÁÏ

Earlier this month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics that public education lost 50,000 jobs between June and July. The numbers are preliminary and don’t show which types of jobs were lost. They are also small in percentage terms (a decline of 0.6%). Still, they potentially mark the end of the post-pandemic surge in school staffing, which had been hitting new all-time staffing highs year after year.

The gains over the last few years have been quite large. In the 2024-25 academic year, for example, schools added the equivalent of 118,000 new full-time employees in various roles, even as they served 135,000 fewer students. That followed the pattern in 2023-24, when they added 121,000 employees as they lost 110,000 students.  

Still, the national numbers can be hard to grapple with, so ÉçÇøºÚÁÏ’s art and technology director, Eamonn Fitzmaurice, and I have been focusing on teacher-specific data and mapping out how teacher-to-student ratios have changed across the country. We’ve now updated our charts using the latest from the National Center for Education Statistics through the 2024-25 school year. 

For most parts of the country, the year-over-year changes are small. Among districts with sufficient data, we found that they employed 11,000 fewer teachers but served 225,000 fewer students. As a result, the ratio between these two figures continued to decline, albeit at a slower rate than it had in prior years.

Click on the map below to see how the trends are evolving in your community. 

INTERACTIVE

Student/Teacher Ratio Growth

As in previous years, we screened out very small districts and those without sufficient data (marked in black). That allowed us to examine staffing and enrollment trends for over 9,500 districts, comprising 92% of students nationwide. We then compared the teacher and student counts from 2024-25 — the most recent available — with the same figures for 2016-17. 

Slightly less than one-quarter of districts had fewer teachers per student last year than they did eight years before. Those are shaded in orange or yellow. Districts in Alaska, North Carolina and especially Florida are predominantly orange on the map, meaning they have higher student-to-teacher ratios than they did before the pandemic.

But many more districts are shaded blue or gray, meaning they serve fewer — or a lot fewer — students per teacher than they did eight years earlier. Overall, three-quarters of districts fell into one of these categories.

There were 2,853 districts where student enrollment declined at the same time teaching staff was added. The most extreme examples come from some of the biggest districts. Chicago, for example, added 4,500 teachers while losing 54,000 students. Fairfax County, Virginia, lost 8,000 students but added 1,000 new teachers.

Slightly less extreme are districts that shrank their staff counts, but not as fast as they lost students. For example, Minneapolis Public Schools reduced its teacher count by 8% but suffered an 18% decline in student enrollment. Similarly, Rochester, New York, reduced its teacher count by 9% as student enrollment fell 25%.

Another group of districts gained students, but they increased their teacher counts even faster. Katy Independent School District in Texas, for example, grew its student enrollment by 27% but added 38% more teaching positions. In Michigan, Detroit added 7% more students but 18% more teachers. In South Carolina, Charleston served 5% more students with 20% more teachers.

As a hypothetical, I also looked at what might happen if districts were forced to go back to the same staffing ratios that they had in 2018-19. If that were to happen, public schools across the country would need to lay off the equivalent of 158,000 teachers. Perhaps not surprisingly, large urban districts like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles would have to make the biggest cuts, but places like Clark County, Nevada; Albuquerque, New Mexico; and Gwinnett County, Georgia, would all need to lay off more than 1,000 teachers if they had to go back to earlier staffing ratios.   

The figures above represent simple ballpark estimates, but a research paper last year from Dan Goldhaber, Grace Falken and Roddy Theobald that approximately 8,300 teaching positions in Washington state alone were funded by one-time federal funds. That money is now gone, and yet the staff remained.

In other words, it’s clear that the school staffing surge continued through at least the 2024-25 school year, but there are signs that boom may be ending.

Did you use this article in your work?

We’d love to hear how ÉçÇøºÚÁÏ’s reporting is helping educators, researchers, and policymakers.