The Texas Education Agency’s 2025 A-F accountability ratings confirm that the Houston region is trending up, with big-city systems showing real, but uneven, gains.
TEA framed the release as a long-awaited reset after two years of litigation-related delays that kept parents in the dark.
“This is about setting goals. It is about what we want to be true for our children. I want them to have their time tables memorized at [by the] third grade. And when they graduate from high school, I want them to be able to go off and be as successful as possible.”
Mike Morath, TEA Commissioner of Education
“I wanna [want to] make sure that you have access to a profession that can make enough money to take care of yourself and your family and you can grow and experience all the dreams that America has to offer for those who are educated.”
For Houston-area school districts, the ratings reflect their progress in the past year.
To end the TEA’s intervention in Houston ISD, the commissioner has set three main exit criteria:
(1) HISD must have no multi-year academically unacceptable campuses under the state A-F accountability system
(2) The school district must come into compliance with state and federal special-education requirements
(3) The school board must demonstrate effective governance focused on student outcomes.
Accountability ratings are central to the criteria, as sustained acceptable ratings help clear the path to exit. In practice, TEA has explicitly tied the timeline to these metrics, extending the takeover through at least June 2027 while monitoring ratings, including high-visibility campuses like Wheatley High School meeting “C or better” performance for consecutive years. The commissioner retains discretion to declare the exit once these targets are met and sustained.
By the numbers
Houston ISD (HISD), the state’s largest district, earned a B (82) overall, a notch up from recent years and consistent with TEA’s dashboard view for 2024-25.
Katy ISD posted a score of 88 (B), a performance that district officials and local outlets have highlighted as among the strongest in Texas’ biggest districts. Klein ISD followed with 86 (B), Cypress-Fairbanks earned 85 (B); Fort Bend and Spring Branch each landed at 80 (B).
Several North and East Houston systems remain in the middle tier: Humble ISD at 77 (C), Alief at 75 (C) and Aldine at 73 (C). While those letters suggest room to grow, the trajectories are noteworthy.
Aldine, long a bellwether for post-pandemic recovery among high-poverty districts, has been singled out as one of the state’s most improved districts over the past two years.
Houston ISD’s surge
HISD’s overall score masks a dramatic campus-level shift. Superintendent Mike Miles said 74% of HISD campuses are now A or B, up from 44% two years ago. The number of failing schools (F-rated) fell from 56 at the start of the intervention in 2023 to zero in 2025, placing 70,000 more students in A/B schools compared with two years prior.
Those claims align with Morath’s celebration of multiple HISD schools leaping from F to A, a rarity statewide. However, pockets of D-rated schools remain and require sustained attention.
“We had a huge achievement gap and our Black and brown kids were behind their peers,” Miles said. “There was a gap with their peers in Texas. In other words, a Black student in HISD was doing worse in math and language arts than black students in the state of Texas by far. Two years later, we’ve narrowed the achievement gap significantly. We’re above our peers.”
Other school districts
- Katy ISD (88/B): Continues to post high marks across achievement and readiness measures and has been touted locally for outperforming state averages
- Klein (86/B) and Cy-Fair (85/B): Large suburban systems that sustained strong overall performance
Fort Bend (80/B) & Spring Branch (80/B): Solidly in the B range - Humble (77/C), Alief (75/C), Aldine (73/C): Overall C ratings, but district leaders point to growth, especially in closing gaps and attendance recovery
What the letter grades actually measure
Texas’ A-F design is built to weigh three things: Student Achievement (what students know and can do), school progress (how far students have come or how campuses have done compared to similar comparison groups) and closing the gaps (how well historically underserved groups are supported or how different student groups are performing).
“These are the goals that our children should achieve,” Morath said. “We put those goals out and then we measure ourselves against those goals because we need to know, ‘Did we do our job for our kids?’ Our job is to make sure that we equip them to pursue the rigors of modern America.”
TEA’s statewide summary shows the share of higher-rated campuses rising versus 2024, reflecting broad improvement after pandemic disruptions.
“The closing the gaps domain looks individually at students who have disabilities, how well they have grown academically over the course of the year, how well they have been supported,” Morath told the Defender. “It looks at families and students who come from households of poverty and how well they have been reaching their academic milestones. The system is designed to shine a light on successes or lack thereof that schools have with those student groups.”
Why this year matters
This release is the first “normal” snapshot in years. TEA emphasized that public, comparable ratings are a transparency tool for parents and a management tool for boards and superintendents deciding where to target resources.
The data arrived amid intense debates over governance and instructional models in Houston. For families, the takeaway is less about a single letter and more about trend lines: Attendance, growth for emergent bilingual and special education students and whether more campuses are moving into A or B territory.
For parents choosing schools, or advocating inside their current one, txschools.gov offers drill-downs by campus, including multi-year trends and subgroup data.
