In the 2027 rankings, the No. 1 elementary and middle school in Texas is located in Houston: Spring Branch Academic Institute in Spring Branch ISD. Because the school serves students in first through 12th grade, the school made both the best elementary and the best middle school rankings.
Spring Branch Academic Institute is a magnet school for highly gifted students and has been open since 2013, according to the website. The school does not have its own campus, so its elementary and middle school students are hosted at Thornwood Elementary School and Spring Forest Middle School. (High school students are part of Stratford High.) Because it is a magnet school, students must apply and go through a lottery to gain admission.
The second-best elementary and middle school in the region was Houston ISD’s T.H. Rogers, which serves students in kindergarten through eighth grade. T.H. Rogers is one of the district’s magnet schools for gifted and talented students in its Vanguard program.
The third-highest ranking elementary school was Creekside Forest Elementary, a neighborhood school in Tomball ISD, and the third-best middle school was Cornerstone Academy, an in-district charter school in Spring Branch ISD.
U.S. News & World Report ranks elementary and middle schools in each state annually. This year, researchers ranked 46,713 elementary schools and 24,756 middle schools across the U.S., including 4,782 elementary schools and 2,322 middle schools in Texas. Researchers look at a mix of student achievement data and demographic data to ensure they are weighing schools fairly, according to the methodology
Houston ISD had the most schools on the elementary and middle school rankings with 17. Spring Branch and Conroe ISDs also had more than 10 schools each.
U.S. News researchers looked at mathematics and reading state assessment results — in Texas, that’s the STAAR — to come up with half of the ranking formula. The other half of the formula incorporated test results “in the context of socioeconomic characteristics,” according to the methodology.
“The top-ranked schools are all high-achieving and have succeeded at educating all their students,” researchers wrote in the methodology.
The data was collected from multiple sources, including RTI International and the U.S. Department of Education from the 2023-24 school year. Schools had to have more than 20 students to be eligible, and they could not be listed as closed or as a special education center in the federal data.