Central Texas STAAR results fall along economic lines

Across Central Texas, the top performing school districts on newly released annual state testing data tended to be in areas with lower proportions of economically disadvantaged and emergent bilingual students, according to the Texas Education Agency.

While districts in the western part of the region typically performed above state averages, those in a swath of the city immediately east of Interstate 35 — which tend to serve higher percentages of economically disadvantaged students — trended toward lower-than-average test scores on the 2025 State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness. Between 70% and 90% of the students in districts like Del Valle, Manor and Bastrop, which saw lower scores than Texas' average, are economically disadvantaged.

As a region, Central Texas’ most low-income grade school students performed at lower levels on this spring’s state assessment compared with similar children across Texas.

About 22.8% of economically disadvantaged third through eighth graders from 14 area districts met grade level on math, compared to 31.5% of similar students statewide, according to the 2025 results for the STAAR test. On the reading test, 35.6% of economically disadvantaged Central Texas students met grade level, compared to 42.9% of their statewide peers.

Generally, local and Texas students improved on reading scores, while math tests found spottier growth, according to the latest STAAR exams.

The reading improvement is encouraging and a clear sign that the state and districts have been investing in that subject, said Gabe Grantham, a policy advisor with Texas 2036, a policy think tank. In general, high-quality instructional materials and clear communication with parents can help students who aren’t meeting grade level catch up, he said.

“As we are wanting to ensure that every single student is graduating ready for college and career and the promise that Texas has for the students, when you see our low-income students not having the tools they need to be successful, that is an issue,” Grantham said.

The gaps in scores, whether between districts or between schools within a district, may be better described as opportunity gaps, said Sarah Woulfin, a professor of educational leadership and policy at the University of Texas.

Districts with higher proportions of economically disadvantaged students are likely spending more resources on services to meet students’ basic health, hunger and welfare needs, Woulfin said. Those services are necessary to ensure students can sit in a classroom ready to learn, but use school staff’s vital bandwidth and time.

A school district composed primarily of students with higher social opportunities can likely spend a larger portion of staff time on basic academics, Woulfin said.

Those opportunity and performance gaps are longstanding, but even five years after the COVID outbreak, educators should be thinking about them in the context of the pandemic and school shutdowns, said Erin Baumgartner, the director of the Houston Education Research Consortium at the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice University.

The third through eighth graders undergoing STAAR testing now experienced COVID-related disruptions early in their educational career, whether that was delayed entry to pre-kindergarten or a year of virtual school.

Families with more resources could buffer those pandemic effects, but for others, gaps widened, Baumgartner said.

“These are because of historic patterns of disinvestment that we still see these gaps,” she said. “That didn’t go away during the pandemic. In fact, it probably grew during the pandemic.”

To view your child's scores on the STAAR test, visit texasassessment.gov, or to explore district and school performance, visit txresearchportal.com.