The school ratings should be taken with a grain of salt. Take Anderson in 2006. Anderson was rated as one of the top schools in America by Newsweek, but was given a rate of unacceptable by Texas. What happened? Well the way Texas ranks schools is it breaks the students into multiple categories and the groups are given ratings. The lowest rated group determines the school ratings. So at Anderson the subgroup of special education students who are given an alternate form of the test received a rating of unacceptable rating and therefore the entire school receives a rating of unacceptable even if other groups were rated as exemplary. By comparison a school where all the categories of students received acceptable would be given a rating of acceptable. Even though if you compared the average of the two schools Anderson would score much higher. Basically the accountability ratings are used to alter behavior. So that schools don't discount or ignore certain categories of students. While that is a noble goal, it makes the ratings less helpful for parents trying to discover the general strengths or weaknesses of different schools in a school district.

Below is how different high schools in the Austin area faired with the SAT; it includes: their main Austin MLS areas, the percent of students who took the SAT, and their average test score. I realize that some people don't like the standardized tests and feel they are biased and/or they are a poor indicator of future success. I tend to agree. But in the absence of something better here are a bunch of test scores. They are ranked by SAT performance (out of 1600 as best).