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City Fund
Great schools give students a fair shot at a good life. And in Fort Worth, Texas, some public schools are proving that every day — even against the odds.
The Fort Worth Education Partnership (FWEP) recently published Cultivating Hope: Fort Worth Bright Spot Schools, a report spotlighting schools that are outperforming expectations for students in high-need communities. The findings are both inspiring and instructive. Across the city, a handful of schools serving predominantly low-income students are consistently achieving outcomes that defy what many assume is possible — and they're doing it right now.
For years, a persistent claim has followed conversations about urban education: that school performance is simply a function of poverty. The data tells a more complicated — and more hopeful — story.
FWEP's research found that among Fort Worth schools serving nearly identical student populations, outcomes can differ by more than 40 percentage points. If economic circumstance alone determined student achievement, those gaps wouldn't exist. Something else is at work in these schools — and it's worth paying attention to.
Using a Similar Schools Model that accounts for factors like student poverty rates, special education enrollment, and emergent bilingual populations, FWEP identified schools that "strongly outperform" what would be expected based on demographics alone. These are Fort Worth's bright spots.
Alice D. Contreras Elementary (Fort Worth ISD) serves a student population that is 92% economically disadvantaged, yet 55% of students are reading at grade level and 51% are meeting grade-level math standards — outperforming several more affluent schools in the city. Over the past decade, the campus has grown more than 30 points in reading proficiency. Principal Amelia Cortés-Rangel leads with a simple but powerful question: "Why not us?" That mindset shapes everything at Contreras, where high expectations are matched with equally high support, including a staff wellness space, personalized coaching calendars, and a data system where every student owns their own goals.
IDEA Edgecliff College Prep (IDEA Public Schools) is a public charter middle school where 61% of students meet grade level in reading and 48% in math — remarkable numbers in a grade band where proficiency rates typically lag the most. The school holds the largest gap of any open-enrollment school between what the Similar Schools Model would predict and what students actually achieve. IDEA Edgecliff's approach is grounded in lived core values, a relentless attention to operations (their team ranked #1 in the entire IDEA statewide system), and deeply structured instructional coaching cycles that develop teacher practice every week.
César Chávez Primary School (Fort Worth ISD) posted the most growth of any campus in Fort Worth in 2025 — a stunning +25 percentage point increase in reading proficiency in a single year, bringing 56% of students to grade level. Serving a community that is 94% economically disadvantaged and 69% emergent bilingual, Chávez has built a culture where Principal Monica Ordaz says simply: "The stakes, for our kids, are too high not to." Culture is the foundation here — the leadership team defined what they wanted the school to feel like, then built every system backwards from that vision.
The Leadership Academy at Maude I. Logan (Leadership Academy Network) has seen more growth in reading proficiency between 2019 and 2025 than any other school in Fort Worth — a 33-point increase that has completely closed the gap with the state average, even though the campus serves a significantly higher proportion of students experiencing poverty than the state as a whole. What started as one of the lowest-performing schools in Fort Worth has become one of the highest, driven by data-driven instruction cycles, strategic central support, and a collective belief that "everybody grows."
Perhaps the most important insight from FWEP's report is this: the practices these schools use aren't new. School culture, instructional coaching, data-driven decision-making, high expectations — education leaders have been talking about these elements for decades.
What sets bright spot schools apart isn't the ingredients. It's the intentionality with which those ingredients are put to work.
At every one of these campuses, strategies become systems, systems become habits, and habits become results. Teachers are developed with purpose. Data isn't collected — it's acted on. Leaders don't just set high expectations; they build the support structures that make those expectations achievable. And every adult in the building holds a genuine belief that every child can learn.
These schools prove that the solutions to Fort Worth's most persistent educational challenges aren't out of reach. They're already here.