When Austin Current launched, we promised to report deeply on a few topics. Education and public schools are among them. Today, we’re delivering on that commitment with a new tool from our partners at The Texas Tribune, now live.
The Tribune redesigned its Public Schools Explorer to add more timely data and features to help families and teachers navigate the state’s sprawling public school system — including those in the Austin area.
In all, Texas has 1,202 school districts and 9,113 public schools, including hundreds of charter schools and alternative campuses. About 5.5 million students attend public schools in Texas, and our explorer includes information on all of them.
Yes, even the 122 campuses run by the Austin Independent School District that serve nearly 70,000 students.
It’s an overwhelming amount of data, which is why our journalists focused on organizing the site in a more intuitive way. We included more context to explain what the numbers mean and why they matter. In addition, each school’s performance is compared against statewide and regional trends, to help families better understand how their child’s school is performing.
We feel this is the perfect time to launch a new site. Parents and families need to be able to see the options available for their children’s education, especially as school choice expands in Texas. We’re showing readers their local campus and nearby campuses, including traditional school districts and charter schools. We show how each school’s demographics, funding and other characteristics have changed over time to help illustrate broader trends.
We also hope this tool will be useful to teachers, school staff, policymakers and anyone curious about Texas education — including those who need accurate and reliable data to understand how policy impacts students.
Each school district and campus has its own page on the site. Within those pages, data is now organized into a handful of categories, including student demographics, classroom experience, opportunities and outcomes, and more. Each category has its own URL, making it easier to share information that matters the most.
We’ve added new data from the Texas Education Agency, including funding information for school districts to help readers better understand where and how schools get money. We also redesigned the districts page to make it easier to find districts using different filters.
In addition to these new features, our site will be more up to date than ever before. Previously, the explorer was updated once a year. Now we can integrate new data as soon as the state releases it, with finance numbers expected in the spring and state accountability ratings in August.
This new explorer builds on the Tribune’s Data Visuals team’s ongoing work covering public education issues affecting students and teachers across the state.
If you have feedback, email us at schools-feedback@texastribune.org. Also, stay tuned for more updates — we plan to release new features soon. After exploring the new tool, be sure to check out the Tribune’s extensive public education coverage for more on how these issues are playing out across the state.
This project is supported in part by the Greater Texas Foundation and Houston Endowment.
