A plurality of respondents to a poll commissioned by The Dallas Express who currently have children in the Dallas Independent School District (DISD) believes that the main reason Dallas is losing residents is the poor quality of DISD schools.
The poll results come on the heels of the Texas Education Agency’s (TEA) recent move to take over the Houston Independent School District (HISD), another big-city school system unable to provide acceptable student outcomes for the hundreds of thousands of children in its charge, despite the hard work of its dedicated educators.
According to the survey, 34.4% of DISD parents polled felt that “DISD’s terrible reputation” is the main reason Dallas is bucking the broader trend of population growth in the greater metro area. Roughly 33% blamed “excessive homelessness and vagrancy,” and 32.6% said it was a “lack of cleanliness.”
Respondent shares were similar when weighing the sentiments of Dallas County residents, with a plurality of 33.6% edging out equal proportions of 33.2% of those polled who pointed to vagrancy and the city’s lack of cleanliness.
The latest U.S. Census Bureau records indicate that Dallas lost about 16,000 residents between 2020 and 2021, putting it at odds with surrounding municipalities. As previously reported in The Dallas Express, Texas’ population has boomed, and the wider DFW metroplex has gotten more than its share of new residents and businesses.
Still, DISD’s reputation has proven an obstacle to growth in Dallas proper, as evidenced by public opinion polling. In fact, a City-commissioned poll found that education was a top concern of residents, alongside crime and the homelessness and vagrancy crisis, as previously reported in The Dallas Express.
The latest TEA accountability report found that DISD’s student achievement scores fell well below statewide averages, especially with regard to STAAR testing and graduation rates. Last year, only 41% of DISD students scored at grade level, and almost 20% of the graduating Class of 2022 did not graduate on time.
Additionally, when accounting for individual campuses, TEA logged 29 schools with student achievement scores lower than 60 out of 100, enough to drag Dallas County down to last place in a student- achievement-score-based ranking measured against Bexar, El Paso, Harris, Tarrant, and Travis counties, as previously reported in The Dallas Express.
While academic performance is a critical matter, parents and district taxpayers have also expressed that they would like to see more transparency from the district and its elected leadership following years of scandals involving alleged grade manipulation, misuse of taxpayer dollars, and workplace negligence.