Eastside Early College High School

Eastside Early College High School in Austin, TX, is a public high school serving 663 students in grades 9-12 within the Austin Independent School District (Isd), and it serves a community where nearly 90% of students qualify for free or reduced lunch. The school has historically faced significant academic challenges, consistently ranking in the bottom 10-20% of Texas high schools, though recent data shows a slight upward trend to the 17th percentile. A stark contrast emerges when comparing Eastside to nearby Lasa High School, a selective magnet school just 1.77 miles away where over 99% of students are proficient in core subjects; at Eastside, only 22.4% of students were proficient in Algebra I in the 2025-2026 school year. This disparity highlights how school choice and selective admissions create vastly different educational realities for students living in the same community.

One of the most concerning trends at Eastside is its volatile graduation rate, which dropped from a high of 96.4% in 2021 to 73.9% in 2024—a 22.5 percentage point decline in just three years. This decline is the opposite of what is seen at high-performing schools like LASA (99.7%) and even other high-poverty schools like Idea Montopolis College Preparatory (98.6%). The school's dropout rate has also spiked dramatically, jumping from below 1.1% in 2019-2021 to 6.3% in 2022 and remaining high at 6.0% in 2024, which is over three times the district average of 1.9%. These numbers suggest the school is struggling to keep students engaged and on track to graduation, pointing to a significant retention crisis.

Despite these challenges, there is a glimmer of hope for English Language Learner (ELL) students, who ranked in the 50th percentile statewide in 2025-2026—a massive improvement from the 10th percentile the previous year. This suggests the school may be implementing effective strategies for this specific group. However, the school's "Early College" mission to prepare students for college-level work faces a fundamental disconnect, as most students are not meeting grade-level standards in core subjects like Algebra I and English I. Interestingly, Eastside spends significantly more per student ($16,318) than high-performing LASA ($9,936) or Idea Montopolis ($10,904), yet this higher spending is not translating into better academic outcomes, indicating that the challenges are deeply rooted in the socioeconomic realities of the student body rather than a simple lack of funding.