REVAMP · Recognizing Excellence through Value-Added Metrics for Principals
Texas Principal Honor Roll
Some principals take the controls of a struggling campus and bring it to cruising altitude. Others keep a strong campus climbing year after year. Great principals are rarely recognized outside their own district, so we built REVAMP to find them statewide. Using 23 years of public TEA data, we matched every Texas principal to every campus they led and measured how far each campus rose. Principals can't apply for this list, and nobody nominated them. Every name here comes from the data.
Software like ours can help, but it takes real people to steer a campus. To every principal on this list: from the whole CoPilot Data crew, we tip our wings to you. Please join us in congratulating them.
How the honor roll is calculated
Who led what. Principal names come from the Texas Education Agency's yearly Texas School Directory, 2004–2026. Name variants (typos, middle initials, hyphenated and changed surnames, nicknames), renumbered campuses, and moves between campuses are linked into one career per person, and every honoree was reviewed individually.
What counts. Campus achievement is the average of the Approaches Grade Level and Masters Grade Level rates on the state test (TAKS through 2011, STAAR after), plus TEA's student growth measures from 2013 on. Each campus is compared every year with campuses of the same type and a similar share of economically disadvantaged students.
Value added. This is the rise from a campus's standing in the two years before the principal arrived to their last two years there, minus the rebound similar campuses show anyway. It is never measured across a change in the state test (2012, the 2020–21 pandemic years, the 2023 redesign), and a principal's first year counts half.
Fairness checks. Small campuses and short tenures are pulled toward the average, because one year's results are noisier there. Each tenure is compared with tenures that inherited a similar starting point. Tenures don't count where the campus's tested population, enrollment or student body changed sharply. K–2 campuses, which report a partner campus's scores, and alternative campuses are excluded.
Categories. A Turnaround principal inherited a campus in the bottom quarter. Sustained Excellence means inheriting a top-quarter campus and still pushing it higher. Selective Campus covers magnet, early college and gifted-and-talented schools, which choose their students. Current principals led a Texas campus at some point in 2024–2026, including principals who have since been promoted or retired. All-time spans 2004–2026, with STAAR-era years weighted more heavily.
Source: Texas Education Agency public data (Texas School Directory; accountability, AEIS and TAPR campus reports). 2026 ratings are preliminary. Percentiles are among similar campuses statewide.
