In this series: Texas 2025-26 Enrollment.

A year ago, Texas was still growing. Barely. The state added 13,035 students in 2024-25 to set an all-time enrollment record of 5,530,499, and even that thin gain was enough to keep alive a narrative that had defined Texas public education for a generation: the growth machine always adds. Since 2006, the state had absorbed 1.1 million new students. The only interruption was a pandemic.

Then the Texas Education Agency published its 2025-26 enrollment figures, and the growth machine stopped: 5,483,304 students, down 47,195 from the prior year. It is the first non-pandemic enrollment decline in 22 years of data, and it is not small. The loss is larger than the entire enrollment of Waco ISD. Whatever floor people thought they saw last year was not a floor.

What the numbers open up

The enrollment data covers roughly 1,200 districts, from the state's five massive urban systems to exurban boomtowns doubling every decade. Over the coming weeks, The TXEdTribune will unpack it in a series of data-driven articles. Here is what jumps out first.

White students fall below one in four. White enrollment has dropped to 24.2% of the state total, the first time it has fallen below one-quarter. In absolute numbers, the state has lost 325,963 white students since 2005, a 19.7% decline, even as Hispanic enrollment surged 48% to become the clear majority at 53%.

Houston ISD hits its lowest point in two decades. HISD dropped to 168,812 students, down 46,596 from its 2017 peak, a 21.6% decline. Researchers at the University of Houston have linked the acceleration to the state's 2023 takeover of the district. Every suburban neighbor gained.

A charter network is now bigger than Austin ISD. IDEA Public Schools grew from 659 students to 79,608, a 12,000% expansion. It is now the state's sixth-largest district. But its growth rate just turned negative for the first time.

By the numbers: 5,483,304 students statewide in 2025-26 — down 47,195 from the prior year, a 0.9% decline, the first non-pandemic loss in 22 years, and the state sits 501,578 students below its pre-COVID trajectory.

The threads we are following

More seniors than kindergartners for the first time. Texas crossed a line in 2021: 12th grade enrollment surpassed kindergarten. By 2026, the gap is 44,132 students. The state is now graduating students faster than it enrolls new ones, a pipeline inversion that signals structural decline ahead.

Nearly half the largest districts are at all-time lows. Among the state's top 50 districts, 23 are at their lowest enrollment on record. The top 10 losers alone account for 74.6% of the entire statewide decline. Growth in exurban districts and charter networks is absorbing some of the loss, but not enough.

One in four students is learning English as a second language. Texas has 1.35 million English learners, up 97% in 20 years, the largest EL population in the nation. Growth was 4.5 times total enrollment growth since 2020 — but 2025 brought the first dip.

What comes next

Each of these threads will get its own article with charts, district-level breakdowns, and context. New articles publish Thursdays. The first deep dive, next week, looks at the demographic shift that just pushed white enrollment below a quarter of the state's students.

The enrollment figures come from the Texas Education Agency enrollment portal, accessed through the txschooldata R package. The data covers the PEIMS fall snapshot headcount for public school districts statewide.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.