Jimmy Carter Middle

Jimmy Carter Middle is a grades 6–8 school at 8901 Bluewater NW on Albuquerque's west side, serving 436 students as part of Albuquerque Public Schools. On 2025-26 results it ranked 183rd of 191 New Mexico middle schools — the 4th percentile, with 0 stars — essentially tied with 2018-19 for the lowest percentile in the school's own recorded history. This is a decade-long pattern rather than a single bad year: the school has never exceeded the 25th percentile and has sat in the bottom decile every year since 2015-16.

Nearby schools show what the same community can produce. Tony Hillerman Middle School, 6.6 miles away in the same district, sits at the 75th percentile, and L.B. Johnson Middle at the 56th. Both serve student bodies that are just as low-income as Jimmy Carter's (free/reduced lunch is effectively universal here), and Hillerman actually has a less favorable student-teacher ratio — 13.9 versus Jimmy Carter's 11.2 — so neither poverty nor class size explains the difference. Jimmy Carter's Language Arts proficiency is 23.38%, about 20 points below the district and state, and math is 9.61%, or roughly one in ten students.

The sharpest internal finding is grade 6: 14.63% proficient in reading and 5.69% in math, the weakest grade-6 results in the comparison group, even though grades 7 and 8 read at a mid-pack level among these same schools. There is one clear bright spot — Native American students ranked 21st of 59 (64th percentile, 3 stars), the only 3-star rating in the school's profile — and one clear floor: special education students ranked 78th of 78, the lowest metric anywhere in this profile. Most recent results also slipped, with reading and math both down from 2024-25 while the district and state held roughly flat.