Jaleel is attending his first day of classes this month at a middle school opening its doors for the first time that specializes in air traffic control, commercial drones, and engineering.
His parents decided not to send him to the majority-Black, F-rated campus closer to their home in Fort Bend ISD. Still, they fear their sixth grader may lose out on the community and support that come with receiving an education alongside kids in his neighborhood.
“This is a very difficult thing,” Mikole Montgomery, Jaleel’s mother, said of the choice to bypass Missouri City Middle School. “I don’t take the decision lightly.”
Black children attend schools labeled as failing by the Texas Education Agency at a far higher rate than any other racial or ethnic group. Majority-Black schools are the least likely to achieve the state’s highest academic rating.
Of the roughly 300 such campuses last year, 20 received an A. By contrast, 105 scored a D or an F.
On Aug. 14, Texas releases the next round of school accountability ratings, largely based on how well students perform on the STAAR exam. Those ratings, promoted as a tool to identify and hold underperforming schools accountable, also serve as an annual reminder of Texas’ struggles to provide Black students a high-quality education, parents say.
That leaves families like Montgomery’s weighing whether to enroll their children in schools where they may benefit from rigorous academic opportunities but see fewer kids and teachers from their communities — or keep them on high-need campuses lacking in resources but abundant in love and understanding.
About 60% of majority-Black schools scored a C or better last year, which Texas defines as acceptable performance. By comparison, nearly all majority-Asian schools met that threshold, as did 91% of majority-white schools and 79% of majority-Hispanic schools.
Texas public schools educate north of 700,000 Black children — more than any other state in the country. And negative outcomes among a disproportionate share of majority-Black schools mean thousands of kids could leave without the knowledge they need to thrive, even as state leaders often say that “demographics do not equal destiny” and have passed laws restricting the consideration of race in education policy.
Education Commissioner Mike Morath acknowledges that academic gaps between Black children and their peers have long existed in the state. However, he points to the preeminent national exam showing Black students in Texas scoring higher than those in most of the country.
“That being said,” he added, “the results are still unacceptable.”
Texas must improve the quality of schools and support for all children — not just some children, Morath said.
“This is where the A-F indicators are important,” he said. “The state’s investment in this is to make sure that our local school districts are changing practices as rapidly as possible to improve these learning outcomes.”
Meredith Anderson, a native Texan who researches K-12 education for the United Negro College Fund, sees the racial disparities in the state’s accountability ratings as “alarming.”
Majority-Black schools tend to suffer from inadequate local and state funding, as well as from limited access to rigorous courses that help raise student expectations and learning, Anderson said. Schools broadly also do not employ enough Black teachers, which research shows can improve learning for all children, she added.
“We often think about it as more so academic gaps when we just look at the accountability ratings, without looking at some of the underlying causes that contribute to them and widen those gaps,” Anderson said. “Even if we have these bright spots, overwhelmingly the state isn’t serving our Black students well.”
When Black parents choose not to enroll their kids in neighborhood campuses as a result, that could also mean the students who remain end up worse off.
