Best Public Schools in Plano, TX

The city of Plano, Texas, is home to 66 schools serving students from pre-kindergarten through 12th grade, with the vast majority belonging to the highly-rated Plano Independent School District (Isd) and a notable subset of top-performing schools within the Frisco Independent School District (Isd).

For parents, the most important takeaway is that school performance in Plano is strongly tied to socioeconomic factors, with schools like Wyatt Elementary and Skaggs Elementary consistently ranking in the top 1-2% of Texas elementary schools, while schools with higher poverty rates, such as Mendenhall Elementary and Forman Elementary, face significant academic challenges. The data reveals a clear "feeder school" effect, where top middle schools like Rice Middle and Robinson Middle feed into high-performing high schools like Plano West Senior High School, while lower-performing middle schools like Armstrong Middle feed into Plano East Senior High School. The city's "alternative" schools, such as Jasper High School, are actually high-performing 9th and 10th-grade campuses, not traditional alternative schools, and the magnet Academy High School boasts a 100% graduation rate.

Key metrics show that Fowler Middle and Borchardt Elementary, part of the Frisco ISD, are among the highest-performing schools in the entire city, highlighting a significant performance divide between districts. Interestingly, schools with the highest spending per student, like Barron Elementary at $15,032, are often the lowest-performing, suggesting that high spending alone cannot overcome the challenges of poverty. The "Senior High School" anomaly is also notable: Plano West Senior High School and Plano Senior High School show very low test scores in core subjects because most students have already passed those exams in 9th or 10th grade, making their high graduation rates a better measure of their quality.