“most districts serve fewer kids per educator than they did eight years ago” Madison 3.5 students per adult
Earlier this month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that public education lost 50,000 jobsbetween 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 The 74’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 datafrom 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.
——-
2026-2027 Madison K-12 $pending continues to grow, fueled by a 9.7% (!) property tax increase. Total spending will be at least $706,000,000 for 25,003 students, or $28,236 per student. More.
