The Houston Independent School District is the largest public school system in Texas and the seventh-largest in the United States. HISD operates schools in most of Houston, Bellaire, and West University Place. The district also takes students from Southside Place and the Harris County portion of Missouri City.

HISD once served the Harris County portion of Stafford, but the portion went to the newly established Stafford Municipal School District in 1982 when that school district started to serve the entire city of Stafford.

All of the HISD area is part of the taxation area for Houston Community College System.

Former HISD superintendent Rod Paige pushed the district into new heights with the PEER Program. Improving scores from its schools have caused a lot of praise from others nationwide. Kaye Stripling took over when Rod Paige headed to Washington, DC as part of United States President George W. Bush's Bush Administration cabinet. After Stripling stepped down as the interim Superintendent, Abe Saavedra became the superintendent of the district.

HISD is highly regarded in the bilingual education of its predominantly Hispanic student body (including recruiting teachers from Mexico, Spain, and Central and South America) and its magnet (Performing Arts, Science, Health Professions, Law Enforcement, etc) High Schools are considered a model for other urban school districts as a way to provide a high quality education and keep top performing students in the inner city from fleeing to private schools or exurban school districts.

There is recent controversy over HISD over a 2003 New York Times report that alleges that HISD is not reporting school violence to the police.

A 2003 state audit of HISD's performance caused more controversy. One of the district's most publicized accomplishments during the Paige era was a dramatic reduction in dropout rates. When 16 secondary schools, including Sharpstown High School, were audited, it was found that most of the students who left school from those schools in 2000-2001 should have been counted as dropouts, but were not. It was found that the administrators at Sharpstown deliberately changed the dropout rate at the school. The Sharpstown controversy resulted in a recommendation to label the entire HISD as "unacceptable." Former Sharpstown assistant principal Robert Kimball asserts that HISD coerced administrators at many schools to lie on dropout rates. HISD asserts that the fraud is only contained to Sharpstown, and that the false statistics at other schools were caused by confusion related to the state's system of tracking students who leave school.

Notable schools

• Stephen F. Austin High School, in the Second Ward, is characterized by its Art Deco architecture
• Bellaire High School, in the city of Bellaire, has neighborhood and both AP and IB programs. It has been ranked according to the Challenge Index by Jay Mathews as one of the top high schools in the United States.
• High School for the Performing and Visual Arts (HSPVA) is a performing arts high school located in the Montrose district of Houston.
• Sam Houston High School is one of the oldest high schools in Texas. It has undergone five name changes and a location change since its founding in 1878 as "Houston Academy"
• Mirabeau B. Lamar Senior High School is a high school in HISD that has both neighborhood and IB programs. The school is so famous that people put it as their school on their obituaries
• Sidney Lanier Middle School is in the Montrose district.

For a full list, see: List of schools in Harris County, Texas#Houston Independent School District

Notable teachers

• Laura Bush, who later became the First Lady of the United States

External links

• HISD Homepage (http://www.houstonisd.org)
• HISD Library Services (http://www.hisdlibraryservices.org)
• HISD Tax Office (http://www.hisdtax.com)

Links on controversies

• News article on New York Times report (http://www.click2houston.com/education/2629076/detail.html)
• Local news report on the Sharpstown controversy (http://www.khou.com/news/local/stories/khou040107_mh_hisd60minutes.11b764a43.html)
• A link critical of HISD due to the droupout controversy (http://www.vdare.com/guzzardi/paige.htm)
• Another link critical of HISD's dropout rate (http://www.berkeleypta.org/pta/topics/testing/20030710a-nyt.html)