The Austin school district’s latest state accountability ratings trace a familiar line across the city. Schools earning the Texas Education Agency’s lowest grades remain concentrated in many of the same historically underserved neighborhoods east of Interstate 35, where campuses serving high numbers of economically disadvantaged students continue to face steep academic challenges, reinforcing a pattern education experts say extends well beyond Austin.

Of the 31 Austin ISD campuses open in 2025-26 that received D or F ratings, 30 are Title I schools, meaning they receive federal funding because they serve large numbers of low-income families. District data also points to progress: the number of Title 1 campuses receiving D or F ratings fell 36% between 2024 and 2026, and 16 Title I schools earned an A or B this year, double the number two years ago.

Education experts say the broader pattern remains familiar in Austin and across Texas, where poverty, unequal access to resources and challenges outside the classroom continue to shape academic outcomes.

The latest ratings also show the pattern is not fixed. Following increased community support, partnerships and tutoring, Dobie Middle School, a four-time F rated school, increased to a D in the 2025-26 school year, pausing its accountability chain.

With mounting pressures, including the possibility of state intervention, recent state oversight on special education and a significant budget shortfall, district resources and time have been limited, said Trustee Candace Hunter, who represents District 1, where most campuses are Title I.

“Should we have done more? I would have loved to have done more,” Hunter said. “Could we have done more? I don’t know that we could have.”

A divide decades in the making

For generations, I-35 has symbolized Austin’s economic and racial divide. Researchers, historians and community advocates have long pointed to the highway as the boundary separating many wealthier, predominantly white communities to the west from many low-income communities of color to the east. This year’s accountability ratings largely mirror that geography.

University of Houston Education Research Center Research Scientist Toni Templeton said Austin’s performance reflects a pattern seen in school districts across Texas. While poverty alone doesn’t determine a school’s success, she said campuses serving large numbers of economically disadvantaged students often face challenges that extend beyond the classroom, including food insecurity, housing instability and limited access to academic support outside school.

Schools designated as Title I serve a majority of students whose families’ incomes fall close to or below the poverty level. In child development, there is a hierarchy of student needs, Templeton said, including feeling safe and secure and being fed, that need to be in place for a student to be able to focus on learning. Statewide, she said resources to provide wraparound services that meet those needs are vital but limited.

“The challenges that they face before they ever get to school every day show up in the classroom,” Templeton said. “The key thing here is yes, this is a phenomenon that you see in Austin ISD, but looking beyond Austin ISD, Texas has one of the largest student populations in public education across the nation. However, we put so little money, comparatively, into our education system.”

Hunter said she sees those disparities play out across schools every year. She said differences in educational opportunities, a lack of time for families to focus on schoolwork, parent or guardian education levels, implicit bias in the classroom and other factors all contribute to achievement gaps. With many of the district’s lowest-rated schools clustered along the interstate and east of it, Hunter said she has long sought to understand why Black and brown students often begin school at the same time as or earlier than their peers but quickly fall behind academically.

Oftentimes lower-income white students do better academically than middle-class Black students and Hunter said the reason frequently goes unexplored.

Looking at the demographic breakdown of how students did at each low-performing school, Hunter said, is key to understanding the groups that need most support and where interventions should begin.

Looking beyond the letter grade

According to Templeton, part of what makes understanding why Title I schools struggle to raise ratings has to do with the rating system itself.

She said the goal of the A-F accountability rating system was to simplify a school’s performance so parents and families could quickly understand whether a school was succeeding. However, she said, a single letter grade often oversimplifies what is happening inside schools.

“We should have a bar that determines school quality,” Templeton said. “I am not convinced it needs to be a one letter grade because there is so much nuance that goes into schools.”

Despite mechanisms built into the accountability system to account for challenges facing economically disadvantaged communities, Templeton said there remains a statewide correlation between the percentage of economically disadvantaged students and a school’s rating.

Templeton said she often advises parents to look beyond the letter grade and examine the data behind it.

Signs of progress

For schools like Dobie Middle School, which was among three middle schools district leaders feared could trigger a state intervention law due to four consecutive failing ratings, breaking a failing streak with a D marks progress.

More than 90% of Dobie’s students are low income and considered at risk of dropping out. About 71% are classified as English language learners.

Hunter said one district initiative has focused on introducing students learning English to test-taking skills in English earlier. Texas allows students to take state assessments in Spanish through fifth grade, but that accommodation ends in middle school.

“If you look at the elementary school, sixth grade, and you look at the seventh grade, you think ‘what happened over the summer?’” Hunter said. “The test rules happened.”

Identifying successful practices and integrating them into a unified curriculum, along with tutoring partnerships and additional resources in key areas of the district, can help reduce disparities and improve outcomes, Hunter said. Some of those changes are recent, and their full impact has yet to be seen. Time and funding, she said, remain the district’s biggest constraints.

“When we see that, we see schools turn around,” Hunter said. “But we don’t have the resources to do it at scale.”

For district leaders and researchers alike, the latest ratings offer two realities: Deep persistent inequities remain, but recent gains at campuses like Dobie suggest they are not irreversible.