Karnes City ISD - EdTribune TX - Texas Education Data

Karnes City ISD: From 94% to 41% in Five Years, Texas's Most Dramatic Graduation Collapse

Tue, 05 May 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In 2020, Karnes City ISD graduated 94.2% of its students, right at the state average. Five years later, it graduated 41.4%.

The 52.8-point collapse is the largest five-year graduation decline of any district in Texas, traditional or charter. It is not close. The second-largest decline among traditional ISDs is Fort Stockton ISD at 24.2 points. Karnes City's drop is more than double that.

The descent was not sudden

What makes Karnes City's collapse distinctive is that it was not a one-year anomaly. The rate fell in every single year: 94.2% to 74.8% to 58.6% to 59.2% to 41.4%. Each graduating class did worse than the one before, with the exception of a brief plateau at roughly 59% in 2022 and 2023 before the bottom fell out again.

The early phase of the decline was steep. The 19.4-point drop from the Class of 2020 to the Class of 2021 ranked among the seven largest single-year declines among Texas districts that year. The subsequent 16.2-point drop, followed by the plateau-to-collapse sequence in 2024, suggests the district did not stabilize at any new normal.

Every subgroup fell

The collapse was not limited to a single demographic group. Every subgroup with enough students to report saw catastrophic declines.

Economically disadvantaged students, who represent the majority of the student body, saw their rate drop from 92.6% to 34.2%. At-risk students fell from 91.7% to 35.3%, with a particularly dramatic path: 91.7% in 2020, a brief spike to 94.7% in 2021, then a plunge through 76.9%, 51.0%, and finally 35.3%.

White students went from 100% to 39.4%. Hispanic students fell from 91.2% to 50.0%. The universality of the decline across subgroups suggests a systemic cause rather than a shift in any single population.

Eagle Ford and the detention center

Karnes City sits in the heart of the Eagle Ford Shale, one of the most productive oil regions in the United States. The town's economy and population are heavily dependent on the energy industry cycle. When oil prices surge, workers arrive with families. When they fall, families leave.

The town is also home to the Karnes County Residential Center, a federal immigration detention facility operated by GEO Group. The facility has been a source of population volatility and community tension for years, and its presence shapes the demographics of the school district in ways that are difficult to capture in enrollment data.

Small districts like Karnes City, where graduating classes may number in the dozens rather than the hundreds, are vulnerable to extreme rate swings from a handful of students. A class of 40 where 5 additional students fail to graduate can move the rate by 12 or more percentage points. But Karnes City's decline is too large, too sustained, and too universal across subgroups to be explained by small-sample volatility alone.

The sharpest falls in Texas

Among traditional ISDs, Karnes City's decline stands alone in both magnitude and trajectory.

Fort Stockton ISD, another oil-region district in the Permian Basin, dropped 24.2 points to 67.6%. Austwell-Tivoli ISD fell 23.1 points to 76.9%. Evant ISD lost 23.0 points to 71.4%. But none of these districts ended below 60%, and none showed the relentless year-over-year pattern that Karnes City did.

At 41.4%, Karnes City's graduation rate is lower than all but a handful of dropout recovery charter schools. It is the lowest graduation rate among the state's 960 traditional ISDs by a wide margin.

Whether the Class of 2025 marks a sixth consecutive year of falling graduation rates will be the next data point worth watching.

Karnes City ISD 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.

The 94.4% Ceiling: Texas's Graduation Rate Returns to Pre-COVID Peak, but 26 Districts Are Below 70%

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Texas's statewide four-year graduation rate hit 94.4% for the Class of 2024, returning to its pre-COVID level after a three-year climb and sitting 7.4 percentage points above the national average of roughly 87%. The recovery from the modest pandemic dip to 93.9% in 2021 is now complete.

But the number that matters to the 26 districts graduating fewer than 70% of their students is not the one on the state report card.

A remarkably narrow band

What stands out about Texas's statewide graduation rate is not just how high it is, but how stable. Over five years, the total range of movement spans half a percentage point: from 93.9% (Class of 2021) to 94.4% (Class of 2020 and 2024). The COVID dip, which in some states produced five- or ten-point swings depending on whether requirements were waived, barely registered in Texas. The state did not relax graduation requirements during the pandemic, which makes the Class of 2020 and 2021 numbers more reliable than in many states.

The trajectory since the 2021 trough has been steady: 94.1% in 2022, 94.2% in 2023, 94.4% in 2024. Each year added roughly two-tenths of a point. Whether 94.4% represents a ceiling or a waypoint depends on the district-level picture.

The top is very crowded

Of the 1,069 districts reporting graduation data for the Class of 2024, 699 graduated 95% or more of their students. That is 65.4% of all districts. Among those, 276 posted a perfect 100% graduation rate.

The median district graduation rate of 96.8% exceeds the state average of 94.4%, which is pulled down by the handful of large, lower-performing districts and the tail of charter and alternative schools at the bottom. The distribution is extremely top-heavy: nearly two-thirds of Texas districts are at or above 95%.

The floor is further away than it looks

Twenty-six districts graduated fewer than 70% of their students, a threshold that the Texas Education Agency considers an accountability concern. Of those 26, only four are traditional independent school districts: Karnes City ISD at 41.4%, Fort Stockton ISD at 67.6%, Hallsville ISD at 67.9%, and Edgewood ISD at 69.9%.

The other 22 are charter or alternative schools, many of which serve dropout recovery populations. Academy for Academic Excellence and Excel Academy both reported 0% graduation rates. Texans Can Academies, one of the state's largest dropout recovery networks, graduated 18.5% of its students.

This raises a measurement problem that runs through Texas graduation data. A dropout recovery charter that enrolls students who already left traditional schools is structurally different from a comprehensive ISD. Measuring both with the same four-year cohort rate produces numbers that look damning for alternative schools but may not reflect what those schools actually do. The state's accountability system has made some adjustments for this, but the headline rate does not distinguish between the two.

The bifurcation underneath the headline

The statewide number obscures a growing split. In 2024, 441 districts posted their highest graduation rate in the five-year dataset, while 260 hit their lowest. The top is still climbing while the bottom is still falling. That 699 districts can be above 95% at the same time that 26 are below 70% reflects a graduation landscape where the vast majority of students are succeeding, but the systems serving the most vulnerable populations are not keeping pace.

Whether 94.4% is a ceiling or a plateau will depend on what happens at the bottom of the distribution, where the rate is 50 or more points lower than the headline suggests.

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.