Charter schools may dominate national education news, but during the 2007-08 school year, they accounted for only 4 percent of the nation’s 98,916 public elementary and secondary schools, according to a new federal statistical analysis.
Published last week by the National Center for Education Statistics, this brief report offers a wealth of national data on school characteristics, including student-to-teacher ratios, school size, school location, types of schools, and percentages of students receiving subsidized meals.
It finds, for instance, that average student-to-teacher ratios ranged from a low of 9-to-1 in Maine to 23.5-to-1 in Utah and that, across the nation, the average high school enrolled 881 students.
