The top reported proficiency rate is 40% in English language arts. The lowest is 8% in Science.
Original Research by School Decision on Cooper El
Cooper Elementary sits on Kingsbridge Drive in Garland, a large, mature city in northeast Dallas County that lies close to Dallas but operates as its own distinct place. Garland is largely car-oriented, built out rather than expanding at the edges, and its housing ranges from mid-century ranch homes to newer two-story builds. The area around the school draws on an established residential neighborhood, and the city's overall housing market has been tracking below the Texas statewide median and well below the national median, with home values declining modestly year over year at the time of this writing. Rents have held roughly flat. For buyers, affordability compares favorably to much of the Dallas-Fort Worth region, though property taxes in Garland ISD have risen recently, a fact worth weighing in any housing decision.
Cooper serves prekindergarten through fifth grade, which means there is no graduation rate and no high school course data to report here. Those measures simply do not apply to this school's grade band.
On the Texas STAAR assessment, the picture is mixed and parents should look at it honestly. In reading and language arts, fourth graders performed at roughly the middle range, with more than half reaching the proficient threshold. Third and fifth graders in ELA were considerably lower, with around a third reaching proficiency. In math, all three tested grades landed in a similar range, with roughly a third of students meeting the proficiency standard. Science, tested only at fifth grade, showed a very small share of students reaching the bar, which is the lowest result across any subject and grade the data reports. Social studies results were also quite low across the "approaches grade level" and "meets" thresholds.
Placed against districts in Dallas County, the school's overall proficiency index sits just above the midpoint of the comparison set. That means Cooper is neither among the weakest nor the strongest performers within its county context, though the science and social studies numbers in particular are areas a parent may want to ask the school about directly.
The student body is predominantly Hispanic, with smaller shares of white, Black, and Asian students, and a small number of students identifying with two or more races. An overwhelming share of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, reflecting a high-poverty community. Data on English learner rates and students with IEPs were not available in this dataset. One point of context worth noting: the third-grade ELA assessment was administered in Spanish to a subset of students, which tells you that Spanish-language instruction is present at this campus, a characteristic some families will find directly relevant.
Garland ISD has been navigating real institutional change in recent years. Voters approved a substantial bond in 2023 to address aging facilities, and separately passed a tax rate election in late 2025 to close a significant budget gap and fund teacher retention and special education. The district has also been consolidating campuses due to declining enrollment, with several elementary schools being merged or relocated. It is worth confirming with the district that Cooper's attendance zone and operations are stable, since consolidation decisions have directly affected which school children attend. The district has also adopted a new instructional framework built around explicit instruction and high-quality materials, aligned to state assessment formats and diagnostic tools, with multi-year achievement targets extending to 2030. Parents will likely notice this shift in how classroom instruction is structured.
Program details specific to Cooper were not available in this dataset. The school website or the Garland ISD central office would be the right place to ask about extracurriculars, enrichment offerings, and bilingual or dual-language programming given what the assessment language data suggests.
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