Texas tracks graduation rates for 13 student subgroups, from gender to economic status to English learner classification. Eleven of those subgroups have usable data. Two do not.

Black students and Native American students have zero reported graduation rates across all five years of available data, all 1,082 districts, and all 1,921 campuses reporting in the 2024 cohort. Not suppressed for small cell sizes. Not rounded to protect privacy. Simply absent: 14,768 rows of blank fields for each group.

In a state where roughly 12.5% of students are Black, the most commonly reported equity gap in American education is unmeasurable from the structured graduation data.

What we can see, and what we cannot

The data that does exist tells a detailed story. Asian students graduate at 95.6%, the highest of any racial group. White students come in at 94.7%, just above the state average of 94.4%. Hispanic students, who make up roughly half the student body, graduate at 93.7%. Multiracial students reached 93.1% in 2024, up from 91.4% five years earlier.

English learners posted the largest improvement of any subgroup, climbing from 87.1% to 91.3% over four years. Students receiving special education services reached 87.8%, narrowing their gap with the overall rate to 6.6 points.

But the question that dominates graduation equity research nationally -- how Black students are faring relative to their white peers -- cannot be answered from this data. Neither can outcomes for Native American students, a smaller but historically underserved population.

A data pipeline gap, not suppression

The Texas Education Agency does report Black and Native American graduation rates through its own accountability portals and TAPR (Texas Academic Performance Report) system. The data exists. TEA publishes it. What appears to be happening is a gap in the structured data files from which automated research tools pull, not a policy of withholding the information.

This distinction matters. Data suppression, where states intentionally blank out rates for small subgroups to protect student privacy, is a common and defensible practice. A rate based on three students could identify individuals. But Black students are not a small subgroup in Texas. They represent roughly one in eight students statewide, and in districts like Houston, Dallas, and Fort Worth, they are a quarter to a third of the student body.

The absence of these rates from the structured data files means that any systematic analysis of Texas graduation equity that relies on downloadable data, rather than manual look-ups in the TEA portal, will miss the state's largest racial gap entirely.

What the existing gaps show

Among the subgroups with available data, the equity picture in Texas is surprisingly compressed. The gap between students who are economically disadvantaged and all students is just 1.1 percentage points. The special education gap is 6.6 points. The English learner gap is 3.1 points. All three are narrower than national averages.

The gender gap is 2.0 points, with female students at 95.4% and male students at 93.4%. Students identified as at-risk, a large category that includes students flagged as academically at risk for a range of reasons, graduate at 92.1%, only 2.3 points below the state average. Texas classifies roughly 60% of its students as economically disadvantaged and a similarly broad share as at-risk, which compresses the gaps by making the subgroups closer to the full population.

The question the data cannot answer

National research consistently finds that the Black-white graduation gap is one of the most persistent and consequential equity metrics in American education. The national gap is roughly 6 to 8 percentage points, varying by state. In Texas, we do not know what it is.

We do not know whether it has been narrowing or widening. We do not know which districts have closed it and which have not. We do not know whether the post-COVID recovery that lifted Hispanic and multiracial students also reached Black students, or whether they were left behind.

The data tells a story about every other subgroup. For Black and Native American students, the data tells us nothing at all.

The Texas Education Agency did not respond to a request for comment.

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