Austin ISD
Most Stable Texas Districts Grew, Yet State Enrollment Fell by 47,195
Correction: An earlier draft treated a linear trend as an expected enrollment path and attached causal explanations the enrollment data could not establish. This revision reports observed Texas Educat...
Texas Free/Reduced-Price Lunch Eligibility Stayed Near 60% for 13 School Years
Correction: This article now identifies the measure as free/reduced-price lunch eligibility, uses published enrollment totals for every share, and removes language that treated the measure as a direct...
Texas Added 1.1 Million Students, Then Enrollment Growth Stopped
For 15 consecutive years, from 2006 through 2020, Texas public schools added students. Every single year. The gains were so reliable they became background noise: 121,701 in 2006, 96,574 in 2010, 79,4...
Houston and Dallas: Texas's Two Largest Districts Both Graduate Under 85%
Texas's two largest school districts tell a similar story with different details. Houston ISD graduated 84.3% of its Class of 2024. Dallas ISD graduated 84.4%. Both sit about 6 percentage points below...
IDEA Public Schools Is Now Bigger Than Austin ISD
In 2005, a charter school called IDEA Academy enrolled 659 students across a handful of campuses in the Rio Grande Valley. Twenty-one years later, IDEA Public Schools is the sixth-largest school syste...
Texas' Five Largest Urban Districts All Hit Record Lows
Texas added nearly 1.1 million students to its public schools between 2005 and 2026, a 25.1% increase. But the five districts that once anchored that system are moving in the opposite direction. Houst...
Nearly Half of Texas's Largest Districts Are at All-Time Lows
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.
The Growth Machine Stalls
Correction: An earlier version of this article stated that 12th grade enrollment rose 34.8% from 2014 to 2026. The increase from 305,243 to 394,947 students is 29.4%. The article has been updated.