Dec. 12, 2006

Five GCISD campuses named best public schools
Texas Monthly ranks 574 elementary, middle and high schools that really make the grade.

Texas Monthly has named Glenhope Elementary and Heritage Elementary, Colleyville Middle, and Grapevine and Heritage high schools to its list of Texas best public schools. In all cases, three years of data from 2004 to 2006 for each school were used to identify these campuses as consistently higher-performing schools.

For the third time since 1996, the Austin-based National Center for Educational Accountability (NCEA), a research arm of the University of Texas, conducted the research for the magazine. NCEA’s team began by analyzing how students fare in measurable curricular areas—reading, writing, math, science and social studies—and taking the demographic makeup of the student body into account, was able to proclaim worthy schools “higher performing.”

NCEA’s methodology analyzes each school’s performance with students in each tested grade, subject and prior achievement group (for example, students in eighth-grade mathematics in 2005 who were below passing in seventh-grade mathematics the previous year).

For elementary schools, prior achievement scores were only available for grades four and higher. Rather than creating a data analysis that would only apply to one-third of the grades in a typical K–5 elementary school, NCEA looked at scores of students from third grade and higher who had been continuously enrolled in the school for three years or more. Prior scores were not used for the elementary school analysis, as that measure was not available for third-graders.

Additional methodology information and a complete list of high-performing schools is available on the Texas Monthly website, www.texasmonthly.com.