Maybe you are house-hunting in Mansfield and the listing brags about “exemplary schools.” Maybe your kid’s Garland campus has a new principal and you want a second opinion. Or maybe a neighbor swears the middle school down the street “got an F,” and you would like to check before repeating it at a cookout. Every one of those questions has the same free answer: the state’s official A-through-F rating, and it takes about two minutes to look up.
Here is where the ratings live, what the letter actually measures, and a few things to keep in mind before you judge a campus (or a whole ZIP code) by a single grade.
The two-minute lookup
The Texas Education Agency publishes its ratings at TXschools.gov, a parent-facing site that covers every public school system in the state, including the traditional districts and charter networks across Dallas, Tarrant, Collin, Denton, Rockwall, Kaufman and Ellis counties.
You can search three ways. Type a campus name (say, a specific elementary in Plano ISD). Type a district name to see the system-wide grade and every campus under it. Or, most useful for movers, use the map: enter an address and it shows the schools around it, which you can compare side by side on the data points you care about. Each school’s page breaks out the overall grade, the component scores, plus enrollment, class sizes and other campus details.
What the letter grade actually measures
The A-F system is not a vibe check. Under the TEA’s accountability framework, a campus grade is built from three domains: how students perform on state assessments (Student Achievement), how much students grow year over year (School Progress), and how well the campus serves specific groups of students, including low-income students and English learners (Closing the Gaps). For high schools, college, career and military readiness and graduation rates feed in as well.
That middle domain matters more than most people realize. A campus full of kids who arrive behind grade level but grow fast can out-score a comfortable campus that coasts. The letter rewards trajectory, not just starting position, which is exactly the argument for looking up the actual grade instead of guessing from the neighborhood.
Why there are two fresh years of ratings at once
If you have not checked since your oldest started school, the recent history is worth knowing. Ratings for 2024 were held up in court for months after a group of districts sued over changes to the grading formula. When the litigation cleared, the TEA released the 2025 ratings and the delayed 2024 ratings together last August, restoring the year-over-year comparison for the first time in a while.
The statewide picture in that release: 1,208 districts and 9,084 campuses were rated in 2025. Compared with 2024, about a quarter of districts and nearly a third of campuses improved their letter grade, most campuses held steady, and 15 percent slipped. On TXschools.gov you can flip between years for any DFW campus and see which direction it is moving, which tells you more than any single year’s letter.
One calendar note: the ratings you see today reflect the 2024-25 school year. Grades for the school year that just ended are expected in the standard cycle under the TEA’s published rating system, which last year meant a mid-August release. If you are timing a school decision, it may pay to check again before Labor Day.
How to read a grade like a neighbor, not a realtor
A few honest caveats from people who spend too much time on this site:
Compare the components, not just the letter. Two B campuses can be very different: one strong on raw test scores and average on growth, the other the reverse. If your child needs to catch up, the growth number is the one to watch.
Check the district grade and the campus grade separately. Big systems like Dallas ISD and Fort Worth ISD contain A campuses and D campuses under one district letter. The district grade tells you about the system; the campus grade tells you about your kid’s actual building.
“Not Rated” is not a scarlet letter. Some campuses carry a Not Rated label in some years, for reasons ranging from smaller enrollment counts to state rules for new schools. The campus page explains why.
A rating is one input. The state grade will not tell you whether the pickup line is chaos, whether the band program is thriving, or how the school handles a kid who is struggling. Pair the lookup with a campus visit and a conversation with actual parents.
Bookmark it for August
The lookup habit is worth building now, before the next release lands. Save TXschools.gov, look up your campus and the two nearest alternatives, and note the growth scores. When the new grades come out in late summer, you will be the person at the cookout who actually checked.
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by a human editor. Figures are linked to their primary sources; where a claim could not be verified from the public record, we say so.
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