The Number Of High-Poverty, High-Performance Schools Is Growing In Texas

Dallas and Houston have some of the state’s top-performing schools, but there’s increasingly more so-called gold-ribbon schools in the Rio Grande Valley.

By Kristen CabreraJune 4, 2019 12:29 pm

For most Texas students, and their parents, school isn’t exactly top of mind now that summer break is underway. But that’s not the case for Texas-based research group Children At Risk, which recently released its annual rating of all public schools in the state.

Bob Sanborn is president and CEO of the group, which publishes the ratings once annually. He says that the phenomenon of so-called gold ribbon schools are increasingly common in the Rio Grande Valley. These are schools in areas where the rates of poverty are high – over 75% of the student population come from families with low incomes – and the student-performance rates are also high.

“In certain areas of the state, we are seeing more of these high-poverty, high-performing schools, and that’s really good news because that is a majority of our school population in Texas,” Sanborn says.

What you’ll hear in this segment:

– What Children at Risk is, and how its rankings stand out compared to those of other organizations

– How Children at Risk determines the rankings 

– Why some schools perform better than others

 

Written by Marina Marquez.