New York City’s public schools are shrinking, and Brooklyn’s are shrinking with them. Tracking the K-12 Student Population in NYC, a report released in October by the office of City Comptroller Mark Levine, finds that K-12 enrollment in NYC Public Schools fell 19% between the 2013-14 and 2025-26 school years. This year’s drop of 21,793 students, 3% in a single year, was the steepest since the pandemic.
By our count from the report’s district-level data file, Brooklyn’s 12 school districts had 221,600 K-12 students in 2025-26, down from 278,918 in 2013-14. That is a 21% decline, with 3% of it in the last year alone.
District 13 (Brooklyn Heights, DUMBO, Fort Greene, Clinton Hill): 17,958 students lost, down 17% since 2013-14 and 1.6% this year.
District 14 (Williamsburg, Greenpoint): 14,007 students lost, down 28% since 2013-14 and 3.4% this year.
District 15 (Park Slope, Carroll Gardens, Cobble Hill, Red Hook, Sunset Park): 24,250 students lost, down 15% since 2013-14 and 3.3% this year.
District 20 (Bay Ridge, Dyker Heights, Borough Park): 42,759 students lost, down 9% since 2013-14 and 2.9% this year.
The steepest declines in the borough are in District 16 (Bed-Stuy), down 46% since 2013-14, District 32 (Bushwick), down 42%, District 18 (Canarsie, Flatlands), down 40%, and District 17 (Crown Heights, Flatbush), down 35%. Bushwick also had the sharpest one-year drop in Brooklyn, 7.8%.
The report says the decline mostly reflects fewer school-aged children in the city, not a shift to other kinds of schools. Births in NYC have fallen steadily, and the report points to families with children leaving the city and shifts in immigration as likely factors. Charter schools added 66,107 students between 2013-14 and 2020-21 but only 11,287 since; private schools have lost 6,841 students since 2020-21; 13,079 children citywide are homeschooled, about 1% of all students. Brooklyn’s Districts 14 and 17 are among the districts where the smallest share of students attends NYC Public Schools, and elementary and middle school charter enrollment is concentrated in Central Brooklyn.
