What the Best Schools Have in Common
We went looking for a secret formula. What we found was simpler, and harder.
We expected to find a pattern.
When you look at a list of schools where Black students are thriving, the assumption almost writes itself: they must be magnets, early colleges, gifted academies. Schools with applications, waiting lists, and the ability to choose who attends.
That assumption is comfortable because it’s also an excuse. If excellence only happens at selective schools, then your neighborhood school was never going to be one of them.
So we checked.
Using 2024-25 TEA data, we identified every Texas school with at least 50 Black students tested where Black students are passing at 80% or higher and performing at or above the school’s own average. Not just doing well. Doing well relative to the school’s overall performance, which is the measure that separates a school serving Black children well from a school that simply happens to enroll them.
225 schools qualified.
Then we looked at what they had in common.
Finding 1: Most of them are ordinary schools
71% of the high-performing schools are traditional neighborhood schools. No magnet designation. No application. No selective admission. Just a neighborhood school with a bus route and an attendance boundary.
Selective schools are on the list, including early colleges, gifted academies, and magnets, but together they account for a minority of the schools. The single largest category is the plainest one.
And it holds at scale. Thirty-two traditional neighborhood schools have 300 or more Black students passing at 80% or above:
David Crockett Middle (Fort Bend ISD) — 1,437 Black students, 81% passing
South Oak Cliff High School (Dallas ISD) — 1,296 Black students, 80% passing
Manvel High School (Alvin ISD) — 1,131 Black students, 89% passing
Mansfield Timberview High School (Mansfield ISD) — 1,123 Black students, 84% passing
Harker Heights High School (Killeen ISD) — 777 Black students, 85% passing
South Oak Cliff is worth pausing on. It is a neighborhood high school in southern Dallas, in a community that has spent decades being written about as a problem to be solved. It has 1,296 Black students tested. They pass at 80%, two points above the school’s own average.
Those students weren’t admitted through a selective process. They simply attend the neighborhood school assigned to their community.
Finding 2: The gap doesn’t just close. It reverses.
This is the finding that changed how we read the rest of the data.
Of the 225 high-performing schools, 172 — or 76% — have Black students outperforming the school’s overall average. Not matching it. Beating it.
That distinction matters more than it sounds. A school where Black students match the average could simply be a school where everyone performs well. A school where Black students exceed the average is doing something specific, and doing it well enough that the student group many school systems have historically underserved is outperforming the school as a whole.
Cedar Hill Collegiate High School: Black students at 100%, school average 97%. Manvel High School: Black students 89%, school 88%. South Oak Cliff: 80% versus 78%.
The pattern isn’t simply “these schools are good, so Black students do well.” The data suggests something stronger: these schools are producing outcomes where Black students are performing as well as, or better than, the overall student body.
Finding 3: The schools are strong overall, but that’s not the whole story
Here’s the honest complication.
High-performing schools have a median school-wide pass rate of 83%. Schools where Black students pass below 50% have a median school-wide pass rate of 55%.
So yes, schools that work well for Black students also tend to be schools that perform well overall. Any explanation that ignores that fact is incomplete.
But that explanation is only part of the story. Plenty of schools post strong overall numbers while Black students trail the school average by 30 or 40 percentage points. We documented 50 of them in a previous analysis. A high school-wide average is important. It is not sufficient.
What separates the two groups isn’t simply whether the school performs well. It’s whether the school performs well for everyone in it.
Finding 4: High schools are overrepresented, and that deserves a caveat
The most dramatic split in the data:
25.3% of high-performing schools are high schools.
2.0% of struggling schools are high schools.
That is a substantial difference. But before treating it as proof that high schools are doing something extraordinary, there’s an important caveat.
High school accountability works differently. Students take end-of-course exams rather than grade-level tests. They may retake those exams. And, most importantly, the students who struggled the most may no longer be in the tested population. Some transferred. Some dropped out.
The high school results are real. They’re also measuring a student population that has already been filtered.
Meanwhile, elementary schools make up 51% of struggling schools but only 22.7% of high-performing schools. That aligns with a separate analysis we conducted: many achievement gaps are already well established before middle school begins. By the time students reach a high-performing high school, much of that sorting has already occurred.
Finding 5: It’s not concentrated in a handful of districts
If excellence were confined to a few well-resourced districts, that would be a discouraging finding. It would mean your options depend largely on where you can afford to live.
That’s not what the data shows.
Eighty-three Texas school districts have at least one high-performing school. The top 10 districts account for 42% of the list, meaning the remaining 58% is spread across 73 other districts.
The districts appearing most often are not necessarily the ones you’d expect:
Dallas ISD — 19 schools
Houston ISD — 15 schools
IDEA Public Schools — 13 schools
KIPP Texas — 9 schools
Garland ISD, Socorro ISD, and Mansfield ISD — 7 each
Dallas ISD and Houston ISD lead the state. Both are large urban districts that often appear in national coverage because of their challenges. Both also contain some of the strongest outcomes in Texas for Black students.
Both things can be true. That’s exactly why it’s important to examine schools individually rather than judging an entire district by its average.
Socorro ISD, on the far edge of El Paso, has as many high-performing schools for Black students as Mansfield ISD. Yet it rarely appears in statewide conversations about educational success.
So what do they actually have in common?
Not a school model. Not a district. Not an admissions process. Not a zip code.
What these 225 schools have in common is that Black students perform at least as well as everyone else in the building. That’s not a description of a particular strategy. It’s a description of an outcome.
And the fact that this pattern appears across neighborhood schools and magnets, across Dallas and Socorro, across elementary schools and high schools, suggests there is no single program to copy.
That has different implications for districts and for families.
For districts, it removes one common explanation. If schools with very different student populations, budgets, locations, and governance models are all producing strong outcomes for Black students, then demographics alone cannot explain why other schools are not.
For families, it’s encouraging. It means a school’s reputation or zip code does not determine whether Black students can thrive there. Some of the strongest schools in Texas for Black students are ordinary neighborhood schools that rarely appear on “best schools” lists.
The only way to know is to look at the specific school.
What to do with this
Search your child’s school. Look at two numbers: the percentage of Black students meeting the standard and how that compares with the school’s overall pass rate.
If Black students are performing at or above the school’s overall average, that school has achieved something most Texas schools have not.
If there’s a gap, and at most schools there is, remember that it is not inevitable. Two hundred twenty-five schools across Texas, most of them ordinary neighborhood schools, demonstrate that every year.
Data source: Texas Education Agency TAPR 2024-25. Analysis includes all Texas schools with 50 or more Black students tested, using all-subject STAAR results. “High-performing” refers to schools where Black students passed at 80% or above and at or above the school’s overall pass rate. Full data is available at bearinglight.org.