Best High Schools in Zip Code 87104

Zip code 87104 in Albuquerque, New Mexico is home to two high schools: Ace Leadership High School, which serves grades 9-12 within Albuquerque Public Schools, and Tierra Adentro, which serves grades 6-12 as its own district. Both are small (285 and 257 students) and both report 100% free/reduced lunch, so economic need does not separate them.

Academically, Tierra Adentro is the stronger performer. Its all-grade Language Arts proficiency is 47.79% versus the state's 43.34%, and all-grade Science is 49.25% against the state's 33.4%; in 11th grade it posts 50% in Language Arts and 42.86% in Science, both above state averages. It has also climbed in the rankings, from the 45th percentile in 2024-2025 to the 68th in 2025-2026. Its weak spot is math: all-grade Mathematics is 15.04%, below the state's 25.54%. Ace Leadership High School shows the opposite pattern. Its graduation rate of 82.4% beats Albuquerque Public Schools' 75.6% and the state's 80.6%, but its available test scores are very low — Mathematics and Science are under 10% in the all-grade and 11th-grade results, and 11th-grade Language Arts is 11.94%.

The two schools also differ in class size: Tierra Adentro has 9.5 students per teacher versus 15.3 at Ace Leadership. Parents should note two limits on these comparisons. First, Tierra Adentro serves grades 6-12 while Ace Leadership serves grades 9-12, so all-grade figures include middle school grades, making 11th-grade results the fairest high-school comparison. Second, some values are suppressed and shown as dashes, and figures such as "under 10%" are bounds rather than exact percentages, so some comparisons are directional only.