Summary:
ZIP code 87575 covers Tierra Amarilla, New Mexico, and contains exactly one high school: Escalante Middle/High School, a combined middle-and-high school serving grades 7–12 with 134 students in the Chama Valley Indep. Schools district. Because it is the only high school in the ZIP, there are no local peers to compare against — the useful benchmarks are the district, the state, and the school's own past performance.
The school's standout strength is its graduation rate of 83.5%, which is above the New Mexico average of 80.6% and identical to its district's rate. That is notable given that 98.51% of students qualify for free or reduced lunch, and the student–teacher ratio is a comparatively favorable 11.1 to 1. Test scores tell a different story. Language Arts proficiency is 18.61% versus 43.34% statewide, and science is 11.47% versus 33.40%. Mathematics is the deepest weakness: every reported math figure at the school is under 5%, including all grades, 11th grade, and SAT School Day, compared with 25.54% statewide in all-grades math. The one clean two-year comparison available, NM-ASR science, fell from 24.07% to 11.63%. Ranking history is also trending down, with the school's percentile moving from 15 to 11 to 2 and its rating dropping from 1 star to 0 stars; the district itself ranks 87 of 87 statewide.
Parents should know that a large share of the school's test data is suppressed by the state for privacy ("—"), including all 7th- and 8th-grade school-level results, so the middle grades cannot be evaluated from these figures. In 2024–25 the school was above its district in English Language Arts and science; in 2025–26 it is below the district in both, a reversal worth watching. In short: a small, high-need rural school that gets students to graduation at a better-than-state rate but posts proficiency results well below state averages, especially in math.
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