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There's not a lot of difference at the high school level, imo. And some elementary schools in Bryan are better than some in CS. It's not so cut & dried.

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Overall, College Station ISD is superior to Bryan ISD. Both spend about the same amount per student (between $8100 and $8600 per student), but CS ISD has the better academic progress by far. CS ISD is in the 87th percentile to Bryan ISD's 16th percentile.

There is a large difference at the High School level, as well (other than Bryan Collegiate HS, which is the best performing, actually, but that's not a school that just anyone can attend).

Academic Progress percentiles by campus:

Bryan Collegiate HS: 93rd
College Station HS: 90th
A&M Consolidated HS: 75th
Travis B. Bryan HS: 7th
James Earl Rudder HS: 5th
The Mary Catherine Harris School: 3rd

Source of all data is the TXSmartSchools.org Apples2Apples application.

Agree. But what are you trying to accomplish with your statement.

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Those numbers only indicate that those who attend CS schools on average have higher test scores. It is not an indicator of quality of education.

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That's actually not at all what they indicate, if you read the methodology from the site.

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Capturing how much schools and districts have contributed to the learning growth of their students is as complex as the number and variety of students served by those schools. Some students test very well with little effort, while other students struggle. If a very high-achieving student and a very low-achieving student each bring home the identical average test result, it would be a source of concern for one of them and a reason to celebrate for the other. There are many non-school factorslike family income, language proficiency, and prior 2 | P a g e achievementthat also contribute to student performance. It can be challenging to separate the school effects from non-school effects.

For the TXSmartSchools academic progress calculations, we follow the scholarly literature by using a value-added model to generate our academic progress measures. A value-added model measures the extent to which student performance in a school (or district) differs systematically from what would have been expected had the students attended school somewhere else. Schools where students perform better than expected, given their prior performance and demographic characteristics, have high academic progress. Schools where students perform worse than expected have low academic progress. For example, a school where none of the students are passing standardized tests would have high academic progress if the students are improving more rapidly than similar students elsewhere in the state. Similarly, a school where all of the students are passing standardized tests would have low academic progress if the students are failing to improve as much as their peers in other schools.

To generate the academic progress measures, we use HLM (a form of regression analysis) to predict the math and reading performance of each individual student. Those predictions are based on the personal characteristics and prior performance in reading and math for each individual student. The demographic characteristics include sex, race, socio-economic status, limited English proficiency (LEP) status, special education status, and grade level. Furthermore, the prediction model allows for interactive effects, so that being both economically disadvantaged and LEP can have a compound effect on student performance, above and beyond the impact of either one alone. Students who are excluded from the "accountability subset" when the Texas Education Agency (TEA) calculates its performance measures are also excluded here.

The predictions capture the share of student performance that can be explained by non-school factors. The average gap between actual test scores and predicted test scores represents the best available measure of the school's or district's current contribution to academic performance (which we report as Z-scores). The academic progress score in math for a school is the average gap between actual math scores and predicted math scores for the students in that school; the academic progress score in reading is the average gap in reading scores. Our composite index of academic progress is an average of the academic progress scores in math and reading.

An academic progress score greater than zero indicates that the students in a school or district are performing better than students with similar characteristics statewide (on average), while an academic progress score below zero indicates that the students are performing worse than students with similar characteristics statewide. To ease interpretation, TXSmartSchools converts the academic progress scores into academic progress percentiles. The academic 3 | P a g e progress percentiles range from 0 to 99. Schools in the 99 th percentile had academic progress scores that were better than 99 percent of Texas schools.

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You expect me to read all that? I went to Bryan schools.

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Hey, my school district isn't the best, either. In fact, we spend more per student for not so great results.

But the point of the site is not to demean certain districts, but to encourage the lower performing ones to emulate the better performing ones.

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You expect me to read all that? I went to Bryan schools.

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Hey, my school district isn't the best, either. In fact, we spend more per student for not so great results.

But the point of the site is not to demean certain districts, but to encourage the lower performing ones to emulate the better performing ones.

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Fact of the matter is that if you took CSISD's students and put them in BISD schools, Bryan would then have the same high performance numbers that CSISD has today. It has nothing to do with low performing teachers and administrators. It has everything to do with low performing students that would perform the same no matter which district they are in.

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This is so dumb. Bryan isn't some urban center large enough to support white flight. College Station is much larger right now than Bryan has ever been from a population stand point. I hate hearing this around town all the time. Just because some white people moved to College Station over the years doesn't mean it was white flight. Bryan has always been a heavy minority town.

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No real comment on this topic, just wanted to post this map:

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You expect me to read all that? I went to Bryan schools.

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Hey, my school district isn't the best, either. In fact, we spend more per student for not so great results.

But the point of the site is not to demean certain districts, but to encourage the lower performing ones to emulate the better performing ones.

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Fact of the matter is that if you took CSISD's students and put them in BISD schools, Bryan would then have the same high performance numbers that CSISD has today. It has nothing to do with low performing teachers and administrators. It has everything to do with low performing students that would perform the same no matter which district they are in.

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So it doesn't matter what teachers/administrators do? It's all the students' fault? Sure, they bear a lot of responsibility (as do their parents), but you can take poor performing students and put them in a different environment and they can thrive. They aren't a lost cause.

And there are certain districts in very poor areas that spend very little money per student but have very high academic performance, while there are other districts that spend a great deal of money per student that have very low academic performance. That's because certain districts are teaching kids in more efficient ways than some other districts.

Sometimes its about people, and sometimes its about processes. Most of the times it is about both.

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There is one reason only for the superior development of College Station. WHITE FLIGHT ! You can argue other things but that is the bottom line. Bryan has always had the predominence of minorities, both black and brown, in the schools. People could escape that by living in College Station. Hence the growth and money has gone south. That will even out over the long haul and the wave of minorities will eventually wash over College Station. Ironically, white flight is the reason I like Bryan better. It seems to be a more authentic Texas town than College Station. Neither city will ever be utopia however.

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Thanks for trying to stir up things where none exist. First off, the "State Streets" in College Station has always been traditionally African-American. Secondly, Bryan let itself deteriorate and did nothing to change. Crappy roads, Houston-style lax zoning, and being asleep at the switch to encourage commercial or retail development. Thirdly, Bryan never lost population after WWII, which is what happened to the major cities in the North, like Chicago, St. Louis, and Detroit. In fact, it kept growing (albeit slowly).

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This is so dumb. Bryan isn't some urban center large enough to support white flight. College Station is much larger right now than Bryan has ever been from a population stand point. I hate hearing this around town all the time. Just because some white people moved to College Station over the years doesn't mean it was white flight. Bryan has always been a heavy minority town.

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No real comment on this topic, just wanted to post this map:

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So? Lots of Hispanics are middle class, upper middle class, and upper class. Racial maps really prove nothing in terms of quality of life or schools. Anyone who says otherwise is misleading at best, and disparaging at worst.

I agree with techno-ag.

That is true. However, you can draw heavy correlations between ethnic makeup of a school and ensuing % of children that are economically disadvantaged. IF you do not agree spend some time on HAR.Com checking school stats.

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So? Lots of Hispanics are middle class, upper middle class, and upper class. Racial maps really prove nothing in terms of quality of life or schools. Anyone who says otherwise is misleading at best, and disparaging at worst.

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Whoa, whoa, whoa... I didn't say or insinuate any of that. The map was posted in response to the comment that whites tended to congregate in College Station and that Bryan had a more diverse ethnic population.

With that being said, the racial dot map does correlate fairly well with the listing price map: http://www.trulia.com/home_prices/Texas/Brazos_County-heat_map/

Again, I am not making any comments about the quality of schools or students because I have no knowledge or information in this regard.

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Right, they are not a lost cause but they are a difficult cause. That is why I sent my children to BISD. I wanted them to understand the real world they will have to live in and learn they are no better than the under privileged children. A child from a poor family with one parent missing and the other parent just trying to survive has a difficult time performing very well in school. They are not a lost cause but do present a much more difficult problem than children from homes with two high achiever parents. BISD has a ton of these children from tough situations. The teachers and administrators are great but there is only so much they can do. If you switched the two student populations BISD would have great numbers.

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They may be a difficult cause, but that doesn't mean that you could take the students, drop them anywhere, and that school district would suddenly perform like Bryan ISD.

For example, there are Fiscal Peers to Bryan ISD that perform much better academically:

Sharyland ISD, Hidalgo County: 97th percentile
Los Fresnos CISD, Cameron County: 95th percentile
Canutillo ISD, El Paso County: 82nd percentile
Lufkin ISD, Angelina County: 81st percentile
Plugerville ISD, Travis County: 79th percentile
...
And many more before you get to Bryan at the 16th percentile.

A Fiscal Peer is defined as: A cost comparison group consisting of up to 40 districts (or campuses) most fiscally similar to each district (or campus). Cost factors to determine fiscal peers include size, location, cost-adjusted wages and student characteristics. Each district (or campus) can have a unique fiscal peer group, though due to similarities, many groups overlap.

So rather than just saying the kids are stuck at the 16th percentile, perhaps we should look to the above districts and see what they are doing to get those kids to perform at a higher academic level.

I won't go into all the factors and reasons why, but "most" cities grow to the north. As such, in most urban areas, the north side is the new, nice, high growth area. The exceptions to this rule generally occur when there is a physical barrier to that northward growth (lake, river, etc.). At some point, the population growth will jump the physical barrier and take off again (e.g., Lake Grapevine).

Bryan is the physical barrier that has caused College Station to grow southward. At some point (probably when travel time/traffic from south College Station to TAMU exceeds travel times from Bryan), the growth will jump Bryan.

College Station is a little bit unique in that the airport has also acted, somewhat, as a barrier to westward growth. I suspect that the Rellis initiative will cause a significant growth spurt in the area between 2818 and 47 and along 47 (i.e., in the northwest corner of BCS). Probably a great area to own land......

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I won't go into all the factors and reasons why, but "most" cities grow to the north. As such, in most urban areas, the north side is the new, nice, high growth area. The exceptions to this rule generally occur when there is a physical barrier to that northward growth (lake, river, etc.). At some point, the population growth will jump the physical barrier and take off again (e.g., Lake Grapevine).

Bryan is the physical barrier that has caused College Station to grow southward. At some point (probably when travel time/traffic from south College Station to TAMU exceeds travel times from Bryan), the growth will jump Bryan.

College Station is a little bit unique in that the airport has also acted, somewhat, as a barrier to westward growth. I suspect that the Rellis initiative will cause a significant growth spurt in the area between 2818 and 47 and along 47 (i.e., in the northwest corner of BCS). Probably a great area to own land......

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In the 70s, there was a lot of talk about Bryan growing north. IIRC, there was a land owner named Seal (?) with large swathes of land out that way who wanted to develop them. Not sure what happened, but things stalled out.

College Station has nowhere to grow but west. BISD extends all along and down the east border of CS, Navasota ISD is already butting up to them on the south and the city of Bryan is on their north. West is their only potential direction and there are impediments to growth in that direction with airport, A and M and railroad tracks. CSISD is about maxed out on potential area for growth.

Shhh...

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College Station has nowhere to grow but west. BISD extends all along and down the east border of CS, Navasota ISD is already butting up to them on the south and the city of Bryan is on their north. West is their only potential direction and there are impediments to growth in that direction with airport, A and M and railroad tracks. CSISD is about maxed out on potential area for growth.

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• How much further south can the city of College Station grow?
• Will the Navasota City limits or Navasota ISD Stop it?
• What are the rules with annexing smaller cities?
• Can College Station annex Navasota?
• Can ISD lines be moved?
• What would happen if Bryan schools merged with College Station's forming Brazos County ISD?
• How would Brazos County ISD change the dynamics and growth of the two cities?

Wow! BryanISD takes up most of Brazos County. College Station is really stuck unless ISD lines can be moved. How did Navasota (city and ISD) creep into Brazos County?

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College Station has nowhere to grow but west. BISD extends all along and down the east border of CS, Navasota ISD is already butting up to them on the south and the city of Bryan is on their north. West is their only potential direction and there are impediments to growth in that direction with airport, A and M and railroad tracks. CSISD is about maxed out on potential area for growth.

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• How much further south can the city of College Station grow?
• Will the Navasota City limits or Navasota ISD Stop it?
• What are the rules with annexing smaller cities?
• Can College Station annex Navasota?
• Can ISD lines be moved?
• What would happen if Bryan schools merged with College Station's forming Brazos County ISD?
• How would Brazos County ISD change the dynamics and growth of the two cities?

Wow! BryanISD takes up most of Brazos County. College Station is really stuck unless ISD lines can be moved. How did Navasota (city and ISD) creep into Brazos County?

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CS cannot annex a smaller city. Nor can Houston or Dallas etc., thus all the suburbs around bigger cities.

The state has flirted with county wide ISDs, pitched as a cost saving measure. Lower administrative overhead if we only had 200+ districts instead of 1000+ districts. But opposition is fierce since nobody seems to want their kids going to school with other people in their counties.

Navasota took care of rural kids in far south Brazos County because back in the day those kids were closer to Navasota schools than CStat schools.

I had no idea so much of the city of College Station was in Bryan ISD. Who knew that the all of the Copperfield Parkway/University Drive on the College Station side was in BryanISD??? Does that mean that even though those kids live in Colleg Station they have to go to Bryan Schools? WOW!

A more detailed map here. http://tea.texas.gov/Texas_Schools/General_Information/School_District_Locator/School_District_Locator/

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I had no idea so much of the city of College Station was in Bryan ISD. Who knew that the all of the Copperfield Parkway/University Drive on the College Station side was in BryanISD??? Does that mean that even though those kids live in Colleg Station they have to go to Bryan Schools? WOW!

A more detailed map here. http://tea.texas.gov/Texas_Schools/General_Information/School_District_Locator/School_District_Locator/

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You bring up an interesting point. What happens when CSISD gets built out? Will property values skyrocket, or will they lead to lower rents like some of the inner areas have seen? What happens when there's no room for new houses and everything gets old?

As long as you can control apartments/govt housing you can control your city.

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I had no idea so much of the city of College Station was in Bryan ISD. Who knew that the all of the Copperfield Parkway/University Drive on the College Station side was in BryanISD??? Does that mean that even though those kids live in Colleg Station they have to go to Bryan Schools? WOW!

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I think most people knew that.

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Flight is used in a more general sense. It includes those who flew from Brysn to CS in the 80's and 90's as well as where those from out of the area chose to land.

Many white liberals in CS would never want to admit it, but the main reason CS grew faster than Bryan was because people wanted the lily white suburban experience and not a diverse town.

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Yes, it had nothing to do with Texas A&M being a mostly all male all white University for almost 100 years and College Station being originally almost entirely Texas A&M faculty, staff, and students. Nope, it was all those white people from Bryan running away from the minorities.

Over the last 20 years when the vast majority of College Station's growth occurred, the number of white people living in the city has declined as a percentage and each minority group has grown.

If white people have left Bryan in droves for College Station that is a Bryan issue (that I don't really believe anyway). College Station's growth has everything to do with the amenities the University has attracted and the highly thought of schools. That is what families and retirees find attractive. Not the lily whiteness of the city which was a symptom of the Universities lack of diversity from the get go. Not of some white flight from Bryan. I've seen no data to support that statement. Ever. It's just one of those things some locals just say I should take their word for. But I'm a local too, ain't buying it...

Bryan has been pretty consistent. Only real difference is the black and white population has shrunk as a percentage as the hispanic percentage grew. That's just a numbers game though as hispanics move here in droves and tend to settle in Bryan in larger numbers than College Station. Overall the white and black population has continued to grow as well in Bryan. Just not as fast as hispanic.

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I was responding to someone arguing "white flight" had not occurred in the strictest sense, and I was simply saying that the poster who brought the issue up was obviously including new arrivals choosing the whiter city (often led there by real estate agents, imo) over racially diverse Bryan. The "better schools" has been a convenient code to use for cover for as long as I can remember, even when it had no basis in reality. Take the prof's kid from CS and plop them into Bryan, they'd still get their AP credit hours and 1400 SAT.

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My thinking exactly

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Right, they are not a lost cause but they are a difficult cause. That is why I sent my children to BISD. I wanted them to understand the real world they will have to live in and learn they are no better than the under privileged children. A child from a poor family with one parent missing and the other parent just trying to survive has a difficult time performing very well in school. They are not a lost cause but do present a much more difficult problem than children from homes with two high achiever parents. BISD has a ton of these children from tough situations. The teachers and administrators are great but there is only so much they can do. If you switched the two student populations BISD would have great numbers.

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Based on what I read on this board, you could send them to Consolidated to learn that lesson.

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I had no idea so much of the city of College Station was in Bryan ISD. Who knew that the all of the Copperfield Parkway/University Drive on the College Station side was in BryanISD??? Does that mean that even though those kids live in College Station they have to go to Bryan Schools? WOW!

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I think most people knew that.

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I knew this, but kind of forgot about it over a period of time.

I may not be thinking straight, but wasn't there a time when BISD was the better place to be?

Does anyone know the current student populations for BISD and CSISD and the projected growth for each?

BISD: 15,943 students
CSISD: 12,377 students

No clue on projections for growth.