District Excellence in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas: A Case Study of Four High Performing Districts

In Texas, Title I schools that have reached achievement levels well above what was expected given their levels of poverty, receive official designations as Reward Schools for demonstrating high academic performance, high academic progress, or both. In 2014, the Texas Education Agency (TEA) partnered with the Texas Comprehensive Center (TXCC) at the American Institutes for Research (AIR) and the Texas Center for District and School Support at Region 13 Education Service Center (ESC) to study high academic performance in Title I schools in Texas. This effort began as a case study of high-performance and high-progress Title I Reward Schools across the state. When researchers consulted a map of Reward Schools in Texas to ensure a distribution of case study schools around the state, they noticed some concentrations of Reward Schools, primarily in urban areas. The heaviest concentration was in far South Texas--known as the Rio Grande Valley--despite the region's equally high concentrations of poverty. This concentration of Reward Schools was located mainly in areas where there were more economic resources and alongside pockets of poverty. As a result of these findings, the study team decided to supplement two years of Reward Schools studies with a third year of study at the district level. This district-level study would be focused on the Rio Grande Valley. One finding from the Reward Schools Case Studies Project was the essential role of district support systems in cultivating successful campuses and fostering student achievement. TXCC researchers found that all the selected Reward Schools operated within supportive districts or regional governing bodies. This finding further encouraged TEA and TXCC to examine the systems and practices of districts with high concentrations of successful Title I schools. With this goal in mind, the District Excellence Study was initiated. This study examined four districts, which provided their perspectives on effective practices for high performance. The four districts selected for this study were chosen because they had at least 25 percent of their campuses designated as high performance or high progress in the previous three academic years, had one or no campuses with Improvement Required designations, and represented different areas of the Rio Grande Valley. The TEA/TXCC team conducted 92 interviews in these four districts and at the Region 1 ESC, which serves the districts. Participants included primary and secondary teache