Children at Risk Letter Grades Assigned to Elementary and Middle Schols, School Year 2023-2024

The displays in this section are based on the school grades developed and assigned to elementary and middle schools by Children at Risk for 2024. Grades for charter schools are not included.

While the resulting graphics that appear when you click on “Display interactive graphs” look quite similar to those for the previous year, there are some changes between the two. But the main conclusion when exploring the data is that there is a much higher proportion of schools in the lowest poverty quintile that receive letter grades of A or B than in the highest poverty quintile. Likewise, there is a much higher preponderance of D and F school grades in the highest poverty quintile than in the l lowest. These results, it should be pointed out, come after at least three decades of experimenting with various iterations of the accountability system in Texas, including pressures from the Federal government after passage of No Child Left Behind.

If one looks at the data over the last three decades in Texas one important factor is the increase in the percentages of students whose family incomes are such that the students qualify for the Free or Reduced-Price Lunch Program. When it is realized the nearly 90% of FRPL students in fact qualify for the free lunch program, and that the family income cutoff for eligibility for the free lunch program is just 130 percent of the Federal poverty line, poor academic gains are more understandable. The percentage of Texas students who qualify for the FRPL program has increased from 45% to 62% during the past three decades. In many districts increases from 40% to 80% have occurred from 2004 to 2023. Some of these data are included in the versions of this software available by clicking on the links ED_0423 or ED_0423_MAP at the left of the homepage.

The grades that Children at Risk assigns to Texas schools clearly demonstrate that educational problems are much more severe among school districts and schools that contain very high percentages of low-income students. Unfortunately, Texas’ school finance system does not acknowledge that a low-income child in a school where 90% or more of his or her classmates are also plagued with low family income is much less likely to show academic progress than if only 10% of his or her classmates are in that category. One might well question the value, or desirability, of economic growth that leaves behind an increasing proportion of Texas’ children.