Houston ISD
Texas Reports Graduation Rates for Every Racial Group. The Black-White Gap Has Barely Moved.
The Texas Education Agency publishes a four-year graduation rate for every racial and ethnic group it tracks, and it has done so in every year from the Class of 2020 through the Class of 2024. For Bla...
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...
One in Two Dallas Students Is Learning English
In 2004-05, fewer than one in three Dallas ISD students was classified as an English learner. Twenty years later, it is one in two. The district's LEP share hit 50.5% in 2023-24 and held at 50.4% in 2...
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...
Texas Has More Seniors Than Kindergartners for the First Time
In 2012, Texas kindergartens enrolled 86,027 more students than 12th grade classrooms. The ratio was 129.4 to 100: for every 100 seniors, there were 129 kindergartners lined up behind them, a pipeline...
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.
One in Four Texas Students Now Learns English as a Second Language
Half the students in Dallas ISD are classified as English learners. Not in a magnet program or a single campus, but across the entire district: 70,422 students who need language support services in a ...
Houston ISD Hits Its Lowest Point in Two Decades
Katy ISD enrolled 44,212 students in 2005. Houston ISD enrolled 208,454. The suburban district on Houston's western edge was roughly one-fifth the size of its urban neighbor.
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.