Landrum Middle

Landrum Middle in Houston, TX, serves 698 students in grades 6-8 within the Spring Branch Independent School District (Isd), a district ranked in the top 30% of Texas, though the school itself has historically ranked in the bottom 20-30% of Texas middle schools. Over 90% of its students are economically disadvantaged, a key factor shaping its performance, but recent data shows a notable upward trend, with the school climbing to its highest rank in several years.

The most striking differentiator is Landrum Middle's exceptional performance in Algebra I: in the 2025-2026 school year, 86.27% of students taking the exam were proficient, far exceeding the district (65.94%) and state (54.03%). This success, however, contrasts sharply with severe underperformance in grade-level math, where only 13.57% of 7th graders were proficient—the lowest among nearby peers like Spring Oaks Middle (2.88%) and Spring Woods Middle (5.39%). Similarly, 8th-grade Social Studies scores are persistently low at 9.22% proficiency, compared to 37.19% in the district and 45.66% at Spring Branch Middle. This creates a "barbell" effect: the school excels at accelerating a select group into advanced math but struggles to meet the needs of most students.

Despite these challenges, Landrum Middle shows promising improvement for its largest subgroup—Low Socio-Economic Status students—who jumped from the 15th to the 44th percentile statewide in just two years. However, performance for White students has collapsed from the 40th to the 1st percentile, and Special Education students saw a drop from the 37th to the 27th percentile. The school's dropout rate of 1.7% is lower than the district average (2.0%) but higher than peers like Spring Oaks Middle (0.4%). Just 1.77 miles away, Cornerstone Academy—a magnet school in the same district with a 15.13% free/reduced lunch rate—ranks in the 100th percentile, highlighting the profound impact of socioeconomic factors on academic outcomes.