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Dallas Suburbs With Best Schools

The Dallas suburbs with best schools analysis presented on this page ranks the 2017-2018 school year academic performance of public schools that serve cities and towns with populations of about 2,500 and more residents located in the Dallas Fort Worth metroplex. The metrics on which these rankings are based are the composite student achievement indexes and college readiness indexes of the high schools, middle schools and elementary schools that serve each of these cities and towns.

Not considered in this analysis were factors that generally have no meaningful linkage to the learning success of individual students, such as graduation rates and changes in student performance on the STAAR evaluations from one year to the next, and subjective factors sometimes relied upon in other published rankings, such as opinions of self-selected contributors of anonymous parent and student reviews and "expert insights" regarding teacher quality.

Dallas suburbs with 2019 best public schools

Shown below are the composite academic performance index of public schools that serve each of the Dallas suburbs listed below. Also shown are the academic performance indexes of school districts that serves the city/town. This data is presented in a table can be sorted by clicking on the column headings. You also can limit the data display to a city/town or school district by typing the name of a city/town or school district in the Search box.

Sources: Texas Education Agency

The Texas Education Agency (TEA) refers to the percentage of total State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR) for all subjects that meet or exceed TEA achievement standards as the student achievement index. The college readiness index used in this analysis was based on participation in and successful completion of high school Advanced Placement (AP) and International Baccalaureate (IB) courses and and performance on SAT and ACT college admission tests. A more in-depth description of how this Dallas suburbs with best public school ranking was produced is provided in the Methodology section at the bottom of this page.

Additional, more detailed analyses that rank the more than 1,600 Dallas area public high schools, middle schools and elementary schools operated by the districts included in this analysis and compare campus student achievement indexes, STAAR results and TEA accountability ratings are available on these best DFW high schools, best DFW middle schools and best DFW elementary schools pages. Lists of the top ranked high schools, middle schools and elementary schools are shown on this best Dallas schools page. Schools with the highest student achievement across all grade levels are identified on this best DFW schools k-12 page.

Methodology

The Texas Education Agency 2018 Accountability Manual describes the methodology used by the Texas Education Agency (TEA) to award district and campus accountability ratings and how the four metrics used in this study to rank the academic performance of DFW school districts were derived. The first of these metrics, applicable to all schools, the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR) score is the scaled score of all STAAR assessments administered to district students during the 2017-2018 school year. Additionally for high schools, the Advanced Placement / International Baccalaureate (AP/IB) and the SAT and ACT college admission tests metrics are the number of students meeting college-ready criteria specified in the Texas Success Initiative (TSI), a state-legislated program to improve student success in college.

Within each grade level category, the top rated Texas high school, middle school and elementary school was awarded the maximum points allocated to that grade level category and all other schools were awarded a proportional number of points based on how their individual scores compared to the score of the top rated school. Scores from both evaluation categories were then added together to arrive at the school's academic performance index. The academic performance indexes of schools operated by a school district or serving a city/town were then used to compile school district and municipal academic performance indexes.

Performance on STAAR tests: 60 points

A maximum of 60 points was awarded based on the percentage of a school's students meeting the TEA's achievement standards on the STAAR reading, writing, mathematics, science, and social studies subject assessments. The STAAR score shown in the table above is calculated by first adding equal weightings of the percentage of assessments on which students’ performance mastered grade level, met grade level and approached grade level, dividing the sum by 3 and rounding it to the nearest whole percentage. The TEA refers to this as the raw STAAR component score. This raw score is then adjusted or “scaled” by using a conversion table to align letter grades and raw component scores of Texas public school districts and campuses. Because the precision of the scaled STAAR star is significantly diminished by this process, but otherwise unchanged for comparison purposes, the raw STAAR component score is used in this analysis to measure relative performance on the STAAR tests.

College readiness indicators: 40 points

A maximum of 20 points was awarded based on percentage of students in grades 11-12 participating and successfully completing AP/IB courses. The school with the highest scores on the College Board AP examinations or IB examinations in English language arts, mathematics, science and social studies was awarded the maximum points for each subject area category. A maximum of 20 points also was awarded to the school with the top SAT and ACT scores.

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