U.S. states spent on average $20,000 per student in 2024, according to the latest federal data, one of the top findings in a significantly pared-down annual compendium of education data released by the U.S. Department of Education this week.
The 2026 highlights report from the congressionally mandated Condition of Education report released on Thursday includes updates on only 17 of the 702 indicators for which the Education Department’s statistics wing collects data from states, districts, and private sources.
Following mass layoffs in the agency in 2025, the National Center for Education Statistics missed the June 1 deadline last year for releasing the annual report and then quickly announced that it would move from a single large compendium to rolling data updates throughout the year, of which the current release is one.
The overall number of public K-12 students fell 2% in a decade, from 50.3 million in 2014 to 49.4 million in 2024. But federal data show the enrollment decline began following the COVID-19 pandemic and was concentrated in elementary and middle grades.
Public school enrollment rose from fall 2014 to fall 2019 in both pre-K-8 and 9-12 grades. From 2019 to 2024, however, elementary grades enrollment has varied by state, but high school enrollment has risen 2% overall.
Likewise, the share of kindergarten and preschool-age children attending public schools rose 1 percentage point from 2023 to 2024, with half of 3- and 4-year-olds and 86% of 5-year-olds now attending public schools. But early education enrollment varied significantly by state, from 48% of children ages 3-5 enrolled in school in North Dakota to 77% of such children in New Jersey, in part because of changing state early education policies.
Enrollment has also shifted along with changes in state populations. From 2013-23, Texas gained 6% more K-12 students, while enrollment in neighboring Louisiana and New Mexico fell 7% and 10% respectively.
Nationwide, the birthrate has fallen more than 15% since 2013, according to U.S. Census data, suggesting future enrollment will continue to decline. A more than 80% decline in teenage births alone since 1991 accounts for nearly a third of the birth rate decline, according to Census data and Pew Research analysis.
The new data also highlight deep disparities in education spending across states, from a low of $12,400 per pupil in Idaho to a high of $33,600 per pupil in New York.
Education data limited
The Condition of Education release says as much about the state of federal education data as it does about U.S. students and classrooms, researchers say.
Tabbye Chavous, the executive director of the American Educational Research Association, called the reduced Condition of Education release “deeply concerning,” raising “serious questions about the ongoing erosion of capacity within the federal research infrastructure.”
In a review of 56 NCES data collections, the American Statistical Association found that 11 were fully active and another eight were gathering limited data; 26 others have been halted, and the status of the rest were unknown or were one-time data collections that had been completed.
Data collection and research contracts were among an early wave of contracts the Trump administration abruptly halted in the first weeks following President Donald Trump’s return to office early last year. Weeks later, the Institute of Education Sciences—the Education Department division that oversees the statistics gathering and research efforts—lost about 90% of its staff in agencywide layoffs. The Trump administration, however, has recently advertised vacant positions in IES.
“NCES has been decimated overall, and they were already the weakest [of the 13 federal statistical agencies] in terms of their critical needs, the support from parent agencies, and safeguards for their independence,” said Steve Pierson, the director of science policy at the American Statistical Association.
Paige Kowalski, the executive vice president of the nonprofit Data Quality Campaign, which works with states and districts to improve education data, praised the 2026 Condition of Education’s timeliness, but noted that it provides less analysis than prior editions. That, she said, could make it “less useful for communities who may lack analytical capacity,” such as school districts.
