Eight Magnolia ISD Campuses Earned an A This Year, the Most Ever. Two Missed a B by One Point.
By The Magnolia Standard · September 18, 2026
The state's letter grades came out in August and the district walked its board through them Monday night. The headline number moved one point. The campus list moved a lot more than that.
Magnolia ISD scored 87 out of 100 in the Texas Education Agency's 2026 accountability ratings, a B, and the district told its trustees Monday that it is the highest mark the district has posted since the state reworked the grading system. The TEA's own report puts the district at 86 last year and 85 the year before, so the trend is short and pointed the right way.
The number that changed the most is the campus count. Eight of the district's seventeen rated campuses earned an A this year: Audubon, Bear Branch, Ellisor, Lyon, Magnolia Parkway and Smith elementaries, and both Magnolia High School and Magnolia West High School. The district says that is the most A campuses it has ever had. Seven campuses earned a B: Nichols Sawmill and Williams elementaries, Magnolia Intermediate and Magnolia Parkway Intermediate, and Bear Branch, Magnolia and Magnolia Parkway junior highs. Two came in with a C: Bear Branch Intermediate and Magnolia Elementary, each at 79, one point under the B line.
Distinctions tell the same story from a different angle. The state hands a campus a distinction when it finishes in the top quarter of a comparison group of schools with a similar size and poverty rate, in areas like reading, math, science, postsecondary readiness or closing gaps. Magnolia ISD campuses collected 47 of them for 2026. Last year the count was 26.
What the letter measures is worth ten seconds. Seventy percent of the overall score is the better of two things: student achievement, which is mostly the STAAR test plus, for high schools, graduation rates and college-career-military readiness; or school progress, which is how much students grew year over year and how the campus did against others with similar poverty levels. The other thirty percent is closing the gaps, meaning whether the groups inside a campus, by race, income, disability and language, are all moving. For Magnolia ISD the pieces were 88 on achievement, 87 on progress and 84 on closing gaps. Forty-six percent of the district's students are counted as economically disadvantaged, which is the group the comparison math is built around.
Statewide, the ratings released August 14 covered 1,202 districts and 9,105 campuses. The TEA said 24 percent of campuses moved up a letter from 2025 and that the share of A and B campuses grew from 59 to 61 percent, so Magnolia's year was better than the state's average year, though not by a mile.
The same board meeting brought a second scorecard. The state's financial rating system, called School FIRST, gave the district 100 out of 100 for the 2025 fiscal year, a grade built on 21 indicators such as administrative cost, the accuracy of what the district reports to the state and whether the outside auditor found any weaknesses in its controls. "The system has become more stringent in how it's being assessed," Dr. Erich Morris, the assistant superintendent of operations, told the board.
Every campus rating, with the underlying scores, is public at txschools.gov, searchable by school name or by address.
Sources: the Texas Education Agency's 2026 Accountability Rating Overall Summary for Magnolia ISD (district 170906), which shows the 87 overall and the 88, 87 and 84 component scores, and the same report for 2025 (86) and 2023 (85); the TEA's August 14, 2026 release announcing the statewide ratings; Magnolia ISD's September 14, 2026 board meeting recap, which carries the campus-by-campus list, the distinction counts, the School FIRST score and the Morris quote; and the TEA's published description of the A-F system's three domains and weights. Corrections to editor@themagnoliastandard.news.