Summary:
The McAllen Independent School District (Isd) oversees 18 elementary schools serving students from pre-kindergarten through 5th grade in a Texas border community, with the district itself ranking in the 74th percentile statewide and earning a 4-star rating.
Among these schools, Gonzalez Elementary stands out as the top performer, consistently earning 5-star ratings and achieving test scores far above district and state averages—for example, 91.54% of its 5th graders were proficient in Reading compared to the district's 66.82%. Rayburn Elementary is a rising star, improving from the 86th to the 92nd percentile in just one year, with 90% of its 5th graders proficient in Reading. A remarkable outlier is Thigpen-Zavala Elementary, which achieves high rankings and the district's best 5th-grade Science proficiency rate (54.76%) despite serving a student body where 96.6% qualify for free or reduced lunch. At the other end, Wilson Elementary and Roosevelt Elementary face significant challenges, consistently ranking in the bottom 25-30% of Texas elementary schools with critically low test scores, such as only 9.52% and 12.28% of 5th graders proficient in Science, respectively.
Key metrics reveal an inverse relationship between spending and performance: the highest-spending schools like Alvarez Elementary ($13,224 per student) are among the lowest-performing, while the lowest-spending school, Gonzalez ($8,864), is the highest-performing. Student-teacher ratios are consistent across the district, ranging from 12.0 to 16.8, but show no clear link to academic outcomes. An interesting finding is the effectiveness of bilingual programs at schools like Escandon Elementary, where 80% of 5th graders taking the Spanish STAAR Reading test were proficient versus 51.11% in English. Science scores are universally lower than Reading and Math, making them a key indicator of overall school health, with the gap between top and bottom schools being enormous.
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