Fort Worth Elementary School Zones

I bought a house for an elementary school. A lot of my clients have too.

So this is not me talking anyone out of it. It’s me finally sitting down and checking whether the thing we all believe is true – and putting the numbers somewhere people can find them.

Here’s what I found. Three of the schools below are rated A by the state. Homes in one of those zones sell for about a third more per square foot than the zone next door. Homes in another A zone sell for the same price as a zone rated C. Same letter grade, completely different premium.

The rating is not what’s being priced.

I pulled every market figure on this page myself out of NTREIS. The school ratings come straight from the state. Where the numbers don’t support a conclusion, I say so instead of filling the gap.

I’m not going to tell you which school to choose. That’s your call and you know your kid. What I can do is tell you what the state measured, what houses actually sold for, and how to find out which zone an address is really in.

START HERE – YOUR ZIP CODE IS NOT YOUR SCHOOL ZONE

This is the single most expensive mistake I see.

People buy in 76109 believing it gets them Overton Park or Tanglewood. It does not. 76109 contains several elementary attendance zones. Three of the schools on this page sit at 76109 addresses, and the state scores them 94, 93 and 82.

Attendance zones are drawn street by street. They do not follow ZIP codes, they do not follow neighborhood names, and they do not follow the agent’s description in the listing.

Check the address, not the ZIP. Fort Worth ISD publishes a School Finder that takes an address and returns the assigned campus:

Fort Worth ISD School Finder

One more thing. The MLS has a field for elementary school, and it’s usually right. It is not authoritative. I’ve run across a handful of listings carrying the wrong school. Confirm with the district’s tool before you write an offer, every time.

WHAT THE STATE ACTUALLY MEASURED

The Texas Education Agency released its 2026 A-F ratings on August 14, 2026. The grade covers three things: Student Achievement, School Progress, and Closing the Gaps.

Each campus also gets a score out of 100. Read the number, not just the letter – a C at 79 and a B at 82 are three points apart, and the letters make that look like a bigger gap than it is.

Source: Texas Education Agency, TXschools.gov, pulled October 5, 2026.

A few things worth noticing before anyone draws conclusions.

Lily B. Clayton is a B. In Fort Worth real estate conversation it gets treated like the top of the list. The state has it fourth of these six.

Ridglea Hills is a C at 79, one point off a B. I was surprised by that one, and I sell houses in that zone.

Overton Park and Tanglewood are 94 and 93. That is not a ranking. That is a tie.

Every campus has its own state page with far more detail than I’ve put here. I’d rather send you to the source than summarize it for you:

• Overton Park Elementary
• Tanglewood Elementary
• Burton Hill Elementary
• Lily B. Clayton Elementary
• Westcliff Elementary
• Ridglea Hills Elementary

WHAT BUYERS ACTUALLY PAID

Here is what I don’t think anyone has published for Fort Worth.

I pulled closed sales for the twelve months ending October 6, 2026, with the search drawn on each attendance zone rather than on a neighborhood or a ZIP. Then I cut it down to single-family detached homes between 1,500 and 2,500 square feet, so I’m comparing similar houses instead of similar labels.

Source: NTREIS, closed sales 10/6/2025 – 10/6/2026, single-family detached, 1,500-2,500 sqft. Pulled 10/6/2026.

Look at the top and the bottom of that table.

Tanglewood is rated A/93 and sells at $355.75 a foot. Burton Hill is rated A/91 and sells at $215.81. Two points apart on the state scale. Sixty-five percent apart on price.

Burton Hill is rated A/91. Ridglea Hills is rated C/79. They sell for the same price – $215.81 against $215.86, a nickel apart.

If the letter grade drove the price, that table would not look like that.

THE CLEANEST COMPARISON IN FORT WORTH – TANGLEWOOD AND WESTCLIFF

I checked the boundaries against Fort Worth ISD’s own School Finder data. The Westcliff zone shares a border with Overton Park, Tanglewood and Lily B. Clayton – three of the schools on this page.

That makes it the best comparison available here. Houses across one line from each other, in the same ZIP, built in the same era.

In the 1,500 to 2,500 square foot band:

A 32.6% difference per square foot, between houses built two years apart, on lots where Westcliff’s are actually slightly bigger.

I ran it five different ways to make sure it wasn’t a couple of outlier sales. Narrower band, wider band, shifted band:

It holds every time. Somewhere between 32 and 39 percent, across one boundary line.

And the days on market number is the one that stops me. Nine days against sixty-four. Same size house, same vintage, one street over. That is demand, and you can measure it.

WHAT THIS DATA CANNOT TELL YOU

Now the part most pages would skip.

I cannot tell you the school caused that gap. Neither can anybody else, and here’s why.

Tanglewood is not just an attendance zone. It’s a Fort Worth staple, and it has been for seventy years. The school and the neighborhood have the same name and the same history. There is no way to separate “people pay for the school” from “people pay to live in Tanglewood” using sold data, because the two things have never existed apart.

This has actually been studied. An economist named Sandra Black published the landmark paper on it in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 1999. She compared home prices on opposite sides of elementary attendance boundaries, inside the same district, to strip out everything except the school.

Her finding: the ordinary way of measuring it said a 5% improvement in test scores was worth 4.9% on price. The boundary comparison said 2.1%.

More than half of what looked like a school premium was the neighborhood around the school.

You can see the same thing happen in my own numbers. Comparing all Overton Park sales to all Westcliff sales gives a 14.4% premium. Narrow it to similar-sized single-family homes and it drops to 7.3%. Half of it was house size, not school.

So read that Tanglewood number as what it is. Homes in that zone sold for about a third more per square foot than homes across the line. Some of that is the school. A lot of it is Tanglewood. I’m not able to tell you the split, and anyone who gives you a clean percentage is guessing.

THE PREMIUM DOES NOT ATTACH TO EVERYTHING IN THE ZONE

Worth knowing if you’re thinking about buying into a zone at the entry level.

Tanglewood’s attendance zone includes condominiums. Over the same twelve months:

Same school. Same zone. Less than half the price per foot, and six times as long to sell.

Buying a condo in an A-rated zone does not buy you the zone premium. It might still be the right move – it’s the cheapest way into that school, and that’s a real thing. Just go in knowing resale behaves completely differently.

Every single-family figure on this page excludes condos for exactly this reason.

CAN YOU TRANSFER IN?

Yes. It is not a guarantee, and Fort Worth ISD says so in its own words:

“Transfers are not guaranteed and depend on eligibility and available space.”

How it works:

• It’s a lottery, with a priority window. The priority window for the 2026-27 year closed March 9, 2026. Late applications are reviewed in the order received.
• Priority runs: resident students, then siblings already in choice programs, then children of district employees, then non-resident students.
• If a campus is full, you go on a waitlist. Getting your first choice cancels your other two.
• Transportation is the family’s responsibility for general transfers.

That last one catches people. You get in, and then you drive your kid there and back every day for six years.

A transfer is a real option. It is not a substitute for buying in the zone if being in the zone is what you need.

TWO THINGS HAPPENING AT THE DISTRICT LEVEL

Neither of these is about any individual campus. Both are worth knowing if you’re buying into Fort Worth ISD.

The district is under state control. The Texas Education Agency took over Fort Worth ISD after a single campus hit five consecutive unacceptable ratings, which triggers intervention under a 2015 state law. The district lost its appeal in February 2026. TEA installed a Board of Managers and named Peter Licata superintendent in March 2026. The elected trustees now serve in an advisory role.

The takeover covers the whole district. I’ve heard people say certain high-performing campuses are exempt or run independently. I went looking for that and could not find anything supporting it. The district held a C rating in 2026.

The district is consolidating. Fort Worth ISD has published a school closure timeline running from June 2025 through June 2029. None of the six campuses on this page are on that list.

But here’s the part that matters if you’re paying a premium for a zone. When campuses close, their students get absorbed, and attendance boundaries get redrawn. You are paying for a line on a map that the district is actively redrawing.

Which is the real argument for checking the current boundary yourself rather than trusting what a listing, a neighbor, or this page said on any particular day.

HOW TO CHECK AN ADDRESS YOURSELF

Four steps. Takes about ten minutes.

1. Get the assigned campus. Use the Fort Worth ISD School Finder. Put in the exact address. Not the ZIP, not the neighborhood.
2. Get the campus rating. Search the campus name on TXschools.gov. Write down the letter and the score out of 100.
3. Check the boundary, not just the school. If the house is near the edge of a zone, find out which line it’s on and how close.
4. Ask what it’s worth to you. The data on this page says the premium is real in some zones and absent in others. It does not say it’s worth paying. Only you know that.