Good Schools vs. Bad Schools

I started teaching in the Houston Independent School District (HISD) in 1984. I left the district to lead a Houston-based educational non-profit in 2008 and retired from that organization in 2018. I was either part of HISD or a partner to the district for 35 years. And during those 35 years, there were 15-20 schools that were low-performing when I started my first day in a Houston classroom and they were low-performing when I retired from the non-profit. At the same time, there were 15-20 schools that remained high performing during my 35 years in Houston.

Now how does that happen? How can the same 15-20 schools remain at the bottom of the achievement barrel without any evidence of academic improvement while another 15-20 remain at the top end?

The 74’s Chad Aldeman looked recently at this “good school-bad school” question in the state of Virginia (9/29/25). Aldeman found that, at least with Virginia schools, the more time that passed, the less chance a school would remain either “good” or “bad”. Aldeman looked at 20 years of test results, focusing on third grade math results.

As one might expect, Aldeman found that schools with high test scores in 2024 also tended to have high scores the year before. Among those in the top 25% of math scores in 2023, 68% remained there in 2024. The same was true at the bottom end, where 76% of schools that fell into the bottom 25% in 2023 placed there again in 2024.

But when Aldeman zoomed out a few years, schools moved from a “good” and “bad” rating a bit more. Among schools that scored in the highest 25% in 2019, 61% were still there in 2024, and 66% of schools in the lowest tier were still there in 2024.

When Aldeman ran the same analysis to compare school performance in 2004 versus 2024, 44% of schools were still considered “bad”, while 50% in the top quartile were still there a year ago.

Aldeman summarized that “you’d still want to bet on a good school staying good and a bad school staying bad, but you should be much less confident the longer your time horizon.”

So if nearly half of Virginia’s schools moved out of the bottom performance quartile over the last 20 years, why didn’t that happen in Houston?

From experience, the first reason is poverty. All those 15-20 schools were in high-poverty neighborhoods. If you haven’t tried to achieve high reading, writing, and problem-solving performance in high-poverty neighborhoods, it’s not easy.

But why did the Virginia “bad” schools, some that were most assuredly high-poverty schools, move up while the Houston schools stayed where they were?

It might be because of outstanding leadership, by an energetic principal and a dedicated teaching staff. Those Virginia schools that moved away from the “bad” category probably had multiple years of consistent leadership when it came to getting kids to become smarter and stronger. But with the Houston schools and probably some of Virginia’s, districts were unable to continue the consistent leadership and dedication that caused improvement, so schools slipped back into low performance.

Whether it’s a Virginia school or one in Houston, worst schools stay “bad” because not enough people care about fixing them. Low-performing schools are filled with low expectations, from adult teachers to unknowing parents to unaware students. Without changing expectations, schools will stay low performing in Virginia, Houston, or elsewhere. It makes no difference.

Finally, did anyone find it disturbing that ¾ of Virginia’s schools (offering third-grade math) fell into the lowest quartile of performance two years in a row? I guess it’s not as disturbing that it happened two years in a row than the fact that 75% of all third-grade math programs in the state finished in the lowest quartile.

Pathetic.

Til tomorrow. SVB