[amyjess]

I'm from Dallas, and we have an interesting split here.

Dallas ISD is notoriously terrible on probably every single axis; as a result, anyone who lives in Dallas ISD sends their kids to private school if they can afford it because it doesn't take much to run a school better than DISD. Seriously, every time I look at the local news, there's another DISD scandal. It's an embarrassment.

On the other hand, the suburban school districts are all excellent. Richardson ISD and Plano ISD are fantastic, as are a bunch of other school districts in the northern suburbs (I remember a friend telling me she wished she could afford to move to Prosper so she can send her kids to the excellent schools there). Not many people in the suburban school districts send their kids to private school, though it does happen occasionally (I don't know whether or not the private schools in the area are better than Plano ISD).

And here's the confusing part: school districts and cities aren't coterminal, even though the school districts are named after the cities. This is for two reasons: 1) Texas doesn't allow school districts to cross county lines (with very few exceptions), but cities cross county lines all the time (Texas counties are tiny and laid out on a grid; it doesn't make sense to limit cities to a single county), and 2) the school districts were laid out decades and decades ago based on predictions of what the cities will eventually annex, and those predictions turned out to be wrong (e.g. Dallas annexed huge swaths of territory that Richardson was expected to annex). As a result, the northern parts of the City of Dallas, which have a distinct suburban feel, are part of the suburban school districts and not Dallas ISD; most of Far North Dallas is part of Richardson ISD, and the part that's in Collin County is part of Plano ISD.