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Nearly Half of Texas's Largest Districts Are at All-Time Lows

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In this series: Texas 2025-26 Enrollment.

Seven of Texas's 15 largest school districts are at the lowest enrollment ever recorded. Two are at their highest. The other six fall somewhere between their peaks and their floors.

That split captures what is happening across the state's 1,202 districts in 2025-26: 206 districts sit at all-time lows while 320 sit at all-time highs. The system is not uniformly shrinking or growing. It is doing both, simultaneously, with the fracture running along a predictable line: urban cores are emptying out while suburban rings and charter networks are absorbing the growth that Texas's population boom still generates.

The 206 districts at record lows collectively enroll 1.6 million students, 29.2% of the state total. The 320 districts at record highs enroll 1.4 million, or 25.6%. More Texas students attend a district in freefall than a district at its peak.

A state that stopped adding students

For 15 consecutive years, from 2006 through 2020, Texas added students every single year, sometimes 80,000 or 90,000 at a time. That growth engine was the most consistent in American public education. It made Texas the second-largest school system in the country and allowed the state to defer politically difficult decisions about school funding, because a rising enrollment tide lifted per-pupil revenue even when per-pupil rates stagnated.

That era is over. After COVID erased 120,133 students in a single year (2021), Texas recovered most of its losses by 2023, adding 101,222 students in one year. But the recovery was brief. Growth decelerated to just 13,000 students in both 2024 and 2025, then turned negative: the state lost 47,195 students in 2026, dropping total enrollment to 5,483,304. It is the second-largest single-year loss in the 22-year dataset, behind only the COVID year.

The 2026 decline differs from 2021 in a critical respect. COVID suppressed enrollment across the board, hitting 862 of 1,200 districts. The 2026 drop is more selective: 517 districts declined while 671 grew. The loss is concentrated in large, established districts whose student populations have been eroding for years.

The Big 5 freefall

Houston ISD^↗, Dallas ISD^↗, Fort Worth ISD^↗, Austin ISD^↗, and San Antonio ISD^↗ are all at their lowest enrollment ever recorded. Combined, they enrolled 482,233 students in 2026, down 115,964 from their collective peak of 598,197 in 2015. That loss is roughly equivalent to the entire enrollment of a mid-sized state like New Hampshire.

Houston ISD alone has dropped from 215,408 students in 2017 to 168,812 in 2026, a 21.6% decline. Fort Worth has fallen 22.6% from its 2017 peak. San Antonio ISD has lost a quarter of its students since 2005. The acceleration in 2026 was stark: Houston lost 7,227 students in a single year, Dallas lost 5,468, and Austin lost 3,101.

The losses extend well beyond the Big 5. Aldine ISD^↗, once a 70,000-student district in north Houston, is down 25.8% from its 2016 peak and shed nearly 15,000 students since 2020 alone. North East ISD^↗ in San Antonio has lost 21.0% from its 2014 high. El Paso ISD^↗ has dropped 27.8% since 2011, the steepest proportional decline among the state's largest districts.

In February, state-appointed HISD Superintendent Mike Miles announced plans to close 12 schools for the 2026-27 school year, citing enrollment declines and facility conditions.

"When students are spread across underutilized buildings in need of significant repair, it limits the resources and opportunities we can provide." -- Houston Public Media, Feb. 2026

The closures affect campuses operating below 50% capacity. HISD reported that 23% of its schools are in that category.

Size predicts vulnerability

The pattern is not random. Among Texas's 15 districts with 50,000 or more students, 47% are at all-time lows and just 13% are at all-time highs. Among mid-sized districts (5,000 to 10,000 students), the ratio flips: 39% are at record highs and only 12% at record lows.

The largest districts are trapped in a structural bind. They carry the fixed costs of aging facilities built for enrollment levels that no longer exist. Every student who leaves takes per-pupil funding with them, but the building still needs a roof and the bus still runs its route. A district losing 3% of enrollment annually does not lose 3% of its costs.

Among districts under 500 students, the picture is more balanced: 22% at record highs, 11% at record lows. Small rural districts face their own pressures, but the sheer scale of urban losses dwarfs them in absolute terms.

Where the growth went

While urban cores contract, a ring of suburban and exurban districts is setting records. Prosper ISD^↗, north of Dallas, enrolled 1,599 students in 2005. In 2026 it enrolled 33,651, a twenty-fold increase. Katy ISD^↗ west of Houston has grown from 44,212 to 95,295 over the same period, adding 12,054 students since 2020 alone. Conroe ISD^↗ north of Houston reached 72,757, up 80.7% from its 2005 enrollment.

Charter networks have grown even faster. IDEA Public Schools^↗, headquartered in the Rio Grande Valley, enrolled 659 students in 2005. In 2026 it enrolled 79,608, making it the seventh-largest district-equivalent in the state. It added 30,128 students since 2020 alone, more than any other entity in Texas.

Seven top suburban growers (Katy, Frisco^↗, Cypress-Fairbanks, Conroe, Prosper, Lamar CISD, and Northwest ISD) have collectively more than doubled their enrollment since 2005. The Big 5 urban cores held roughly flat through 2020, then plunged to 82% of their 2005 level. The suburban group has been climbing steadily the entire time, and the gap between the two tracks has never been wider.

Birth rates, housing, and competition

Three forces are converging to drive the urban-suburban split.

The first is demographic. Texas birth rates declined nearly 21% between 2007 and 2019, outpacing the national average. The decline was sharpest among Hispanic women, whose birth rates fell 31% over that period. Because urban cores have higher concentrations of Hispanic families, the birth rate decline hits them disproportionately.

The second is housing. Suburban growth in Texas tracks residential construction, and the state's building boom has been overwhelmingly concentrated in exurban corridors. Prosper ISD's superintendent Holly Ferguson told the Denton Record-Chronicle that the district spends significant time planning for "the future of slowing down," acknowledging that the growth corridor will eventually mature. Forney ISD, east of Dallas, has doubled from 9,000 to nearly 20,000 students in a decade and projects eventual growth to 50,000.

The third is competition from charter schools and, beginning in 2026-27, from state-funded Education Savings Accounts. A Rice University Kinder Institute analysis found that net transfers out of HISD to charter schools increased by 10,000 since 2017, with YES Prep and KIPP alone accounting for half the loss. Statewide, charter-like networks enrolled at least 269,000 students in 2026, nearly 5% of total enrollment.

The Kinder Institute analysis also found that HISD's school-age population dropped 20% within district boundaries between 2017 and 2021, representing 62,000 fewer children. The enrollment decline is not solely a story of families choosing other schools. In many cases, the families themselves have left.

What maturity looks like

Even the growth story has cracks. Frisco ISD, which added 3,000 students a year for 15 years and was once the fastest-growing district in the country, has now lost roughly 3,000 students from its peak of 67,000. The district is considering school closures and has launched open enrollment and virtual programs to compete for students. This is the trajectory that awaits today's boomtowns: Prosper, Forney, and Northwest ISD are building schools as fast as they can, but the housing stock that drives their growth will eventually mature. Homes that produce two elementary students today will produce zero in 15 years.

The Texas Education Freedom Accounts program, signed into law and launching for 2026-27, adds another variable. The program offers approximately $10,000 per student for private school tuition, with applications due March 17. If those students come disproportionately from large urban districts already at record lows, the fiscal pressure will compound.

The question ahead

Texas's school finance system sends per-pupil dollars with the student. The state's basic allotment has been frozen at $6,160 since 2019, and districts losing hundreds or thousands of students each year face a compounding structural problem: fewer students, less money, same buildings, same debt service, same transportation routes. Houston ISD's decision to close 12 schools is the visible edge of that math, and Aldine, Fort Bend, and other Houston-area districts have announced similar moves.

The 320 districts at record highs face a different version of the same problem: they need new schools, new teachers, and new infrastructure, funded by a per-pupil allotment that has not kept pace with construction costs. Prosper ISD has been building schools larger than standard to absorb growth, but capital spending in a rapid-growth district is a bet on continued migration that may or may not materialize.

The enrollment data cannot tell us where the 47,195 students who disappeared from the state total in 2026 went. Some were never born. Some moved to other states. Some shifted to private schools or homeschooling. What the data does show is that Texas public education is no longer a single system moving in one direction. It is two systems, one shrinking and one expanding, sharing the same funding formula and the same political leadership but facing fundamentally different operational realities.

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

The Growth Machine Stalls

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In this series: Texas 2025-26 Enrollment.

For 15 consecutive years, Texas added students. Every year from 2006 through 2020, the enrollment count climbed, absorbing 1.1 million new students over a period when most large states were already shrinking. The pandemic interrupted that streak with a 120,133-student drop in 2021, but the state recovered quickly, posting a 101,222-student rebound in 2023 and setting an all-time high of 5,530,499 in 2025.

Then 2026 happened. Enrollment fell by 47,195 students, a 0.9% decline, to 5,483,304. It is the first non-pandemic drop in 22 years of data, and it did not arrive as a surprise. Growth had been decelerating for nearly a decade: from gains of 96,574 in 2010 to just 13,035 in 2025. The machine was slowing long before it stopped.

A decade of deceleration

The 2026 decline did not materialize overnight. Annual growth peaked at 121,701 students in 2006, then gradually eroded. By 2018, the state was adding fewer than 42,000 students per year. By 2019, just 31,388. A one-year spike in 2023, when post-COVID recovery inflated the numbers by 101,222, masked the underlying trend. The two years that followed, 2024 and 2025, each added only about 13,000 students, a growth rate below 0.25%.

The 2026 loss of 47,195 is smaller than the pandemic's 120,133-student hit. But the pandemic drop had an obvious external cause and an immediate rebound. This decline has neither.

The state now sits 501,578 students below where a pre-COVID linear trajectory would have placed it. That gap, equivalent to roughly the enrollment of the state's 10 largest districts combined, represents both students who never materialized and growth that will not return.

The Big 5 are all shrinking

Texas's five largest traditional districts are each well below their peak enrollment, and all five declined in 2025-26. Houston ISD^↗, the state's largest, lost 7,227 students in a single year, dropping to 168,812. Since its peak of 215,408 in 2017, the district has shed 46,596 students, a 21.6% decline. Dallas ISD^↗ fell by 5,468 to 134,308, now 16.6% below its 2006 peak. San Antonio ISD^↗ has lost a quarter of its enrollment since 2005.

Fort Worth ISD^↗ is down 22.6% from its 2017 peak of 87,233. Austin ISD^↗ has fallen 19.9% from its 2013 high of 86,233.

Across the state, 517 of 1,197 districts lost students in 2025-26. The top 10 losers alone account for 35,199 students, 74.6% of the statewide decline. The top 25 losers lost 59,717, more than the total statewide loss, meaning hundreds of growing districts merely offset a fraction of the hemorrhaging at the top.

Houston's accelerating exit

Houston ISD's trajectory stands apart. The district's 4.1% single-year decline in 2025-26 accelerated a pattern that researchers at the University of Houston have linked to the state's 2023 takeover of the district.

"Was there a trend of decline before the takeover? Yes. Has that trend been exacerbated by the takeover? We think those two things are coinciding." — Toni Templeton, UH Institute for Education Policy Research and Evaluation, Houston Public Media, Jan. 2026

The UH report found that more than 13,000 students left HISD in the first two years under state management, with the percentage of students leaving nearly doubling from 4.4% to 8.1%. High school enrollment dropped 15.1% in two years, a steeper decline than the pre-takeover trend. The share of uncertified teachers rose from 0.3% in 2016-17 to 19.8% in 2024-25.

The 7,227-student loss in 2026 pushes HISD's total decline since its 2017 peak past 46,000 students, a loss larger than the entire enrollment of Aldine ISD^↗, the district's northern neighbor. Aldine itself lost 4,178 students in 2025-26, a 7.4% drop, the steepest percentage decline among the state's top 15 losers.

Where the growth went

The top of the gainers list reveals a pattern: charter networks and exurban boomtowns. IDEA Public Schools^↗, the state's largest charter operator, added 30,128 students since 2020, a 60.9% increase, reaching 79,608. Prosper ISD^↗, north of Dallas, doubled from 16,789 to 33,651 over the same span.

Among the 2025-26 gainers, seven of the top 15 are charter networks: Premier High Schools, BASIS Texas, Harmony Public Schools (three regions), Great Hearts Texas, and YES Prep. Charter enrollment rose from 422,836 in 2024 to 449,066 in 2026, an 8.2% share of statewide enrollment, up from 7.7% two years earlier. Over the same two-year period, traditional districts lost 60,380 students while charters gained 26,230.

That divergence has a fiscal dimension. Under Texas's ADA-based funding formula, each student who leaves carries per-pupil state revenue with them, but the sending district's fixed costs, its buildings, buses, and central office, do not shrink proportionally. Districts losing 3-5% of enrollment annually face a structural mismatch between revenue and overhead.

The pipeline is closing

Perhaps the most consequential signal in the data is not what happened in 2026, but what has been building for years in the lower grades. Kindergarten enrollment peaked at 391,421 in 2014 and has fallen steadily since, reaching 350,815 in 2026, a 10.4% decline. Over the same period, 12th grade enrollment rose from 305,243 to 394,947, a 34.8% increase.

The lines crossed in 2021, when for the first time, Texas enrolled more 12th graders (362,888) than kindergartners (360,865). In 2026, the gap is 44,132 students: the K-to-12 ratio has fallen to 0.89, meaning the state is graduating students substantially faster than it is enrolling new ones.

The demographic math behind this is straightforward. TEA's own attendance projections note that "the Texas state demographer estimates a significant decline in the number of four-year-olds in Texas, with a loss of over 40,000 from 2020 to 2025." TEA projects statewide average daily attendance will decline 0.31% in 2025-26 and 0.38% in 2026-27. The agency's projected ADA for 2026-27, 4,990,784, would represent a continued contraction.

Reporting from the Fort Worth Report found that a majority of ZIP codes in Fort Worth ISD saw declining birth rates between 2014 and 2023, and that Arlington ISD's kindergarten count fell from 4,610 in 2014 to 3,347 in 2024.

"We are still the fastest-growing state in the country and yet, we are seeing these low numbers." — Rocky Gardiner, demographer, Fort Worth Report, May 2025

Frozen funding meets falling headcount

The enrollment decline arrives at a particularly bad time for Texas school finance. The state's basic allotment, the per-student foundation of the funding formula, was frozen at $6,160 from 2019 through 2025 before HB 2 raised it to $6,215 for the 2025-2027 biennium, a 0.9% increase against six years of cumulative inflation. Districts are absorbing both inflationary cost increases and declining student counts simultaneously.

For the 201 districts now at all-time low enrollment, the formula compounds in a single direction: fewer students means less state funding, but buildings still need heating, buses still need drivers, and debt service on construction bonds issued during the growth years does not adjust downward. The 307 districts that reached all-time high enrollment in 2026, many of them suburban or exurban, face the inverse problem: growth without proportional facility capacity.

Neither group is well-served by a funding formula built on the assumption that enrollment always rises.

What the data leaves unresolved

Charter growth of 13,185 students in 2025-26 accounts for some redistribution within the public system, but home-schooling, private schools, and interstate migration are invisible in TEA enrollment data. The state does not publish a comprehensive accounting of where exiting students go.

The Houston metro complicates any single explanation. HISD lost 7,227 students, the largest single-district decline. But neighboring Cypress-Fairbanks ISD^↗ lost 2,961, Aldine lost 4,178, and Pasadena ISD lost 2,257. The entire metro is contracting, not just the district under state management.

The turn

For two decades, Texas school administrators could plan around a reliable assumption: next year, there will be more students. Bond elections, staffing plans, and facility master plans all embedded that assumption. In 2026, for the first time outside a pandemic, the assumption broke.

The state's school finance system was built on the assumption that enrollment always rises. The basic allotment sat frozen for six years. The 201 districts at all-time lows and the 307 at all-time highs need opposite things from that formula, and neither group is getting them. The 2026 numbers are the first test of whether Texas can govern a school system in reverse.

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