Texas school ratings improve, but more campuses inch closer to state sanctions

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The share of Texas public schools that are failing dropped by half in the past year, marking the lowest rate of underperforming campuses since 2019.

New data released by the Texas Education Agency on Friday show public schools have made overall gains in their state ratings, which measure how well they are educating their students. About one in three campuses saw increases from the prior year.

Of 9,084 public schools in the 2024-25 school year, 23% got an A, 57% got a B or C, and 15% got a D or F. The TEA also released grades for the 2023-24 school year, which had been held up in court.

These letter grades shape communities. Parents may pull their kid out of a school after a low score. And all it takes is five years of failing grades at one campus for a district to face bruising sanctions. The state has ordered underperforming schools to shut down and replaced a district’s democratically elected school board with state appointees when they have reached that threshold — like with the Houston school district in 2023.

Struggling schools are inching toward those state sanctions. According to analysis from The Texas Tribune, the number of schools with consecutive years of grades deemed unacceptable by the TEA — a D or an F — jumped from 64 in the 2022-23 school year to 348 in the 2024-25 school year.

The release of the two years of ratings came Friday after a state appeals court put an end to a fight between school districts and the state over how grades were calculated. The appeals court ruled TEA could release the ratings, overturning a freeze from a lower court. A similar ruling from the same high court allowed the state to release ratings for the 2022-23 school year in the spring.

Ratings for schools and districts largely depend on standardized test scores and are based on three categories: how students perform on state tests and meet college and career readiness benchmarks; how students improve on their academic skills over time; and how well schools are educating the state’s most disadvantaged students.

This is a developing story; check back for details.

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