Barrington Elementary

Barrington Elementary is a PK-5 school in the Austin Independent School District (Isd) serving 405 students in a high-poverty area, where over 94% of students qualify for free or reduced lunch. The school has consistently ranked in the bottom 10% of Texas elementary schools over the past decade, with its most recent state ranking at the 5th percentile, placing it among the lowest-performing schools in its immediate cluster of nearby schools.

The most striking finding is the comparison with Guerrero Thompson, a charter school located just 0.3 miles away that serves an almost identical high-poverty population. While Barrington ranked at the 6th percentile in 2024-2025, Guerrero Thompson ranked at the 53rd percentile. In 5th-grade Science that year, Barrington had 0% proficiency compared to Guerrero Thompson's 68.42% proficiency. This massive performance gap between two schools serving the same community highlights that the challenges at Barrington are not solely a function of student poverty, pointing instead to significant differences in school leadership, instructional quality, and school culture.

Interestingly, Barrington's Spanish-language STAAR program often outperforms district and state averages, with 3rd-grade Reading in Spanish reaching 29.17% proficiency in 2025-2026 compared to the district's 20.4%. The school's Special Education subgroup also ranked in the 50th percentile in 2023-2024, a remarkable achievement for a school otherwise in the bottom 10%. These pockets of success suggest effective practices exist within the building but are not being scaled to benefit the entire student body. The school's per-student spending of $12,211 is on par with or higher than its AISD peers, indicating that the struggles are not due to a lack of funding but rather how those funds are being utilized to drive academic outcomes.