The top reported proficiency rate is 53% in English language arts. The lowest is 26% in Math.
Original Research by School Decision on Cleveland Middle
Cleveland Middle sits in the Northeast Heights of Albuquerque, serving grades six through eight as a regular public school in the Albuquerque Public Schools district. The campus sits on Natalie Street NE, in a part of the city known for its residential neighborhoods stretching east toward the Sandia Mountains. Albuquerque is New Mexico's largest city, a sprawling, car-oriented place organized into quadrants by Central Avenue and the railroad tracks. The Northeast Heights, where Cleveland is located, is one of the city's more established suburban areas, with strip commercial corridors along the main arterials and quieter residential streets behind them.
The school's enrollment is moderate for a middle school, with students distributed fairly evenly across the three grade levels. The student body is majority Hispanic, with a substantial American Indian and Alaska Native population, a smaller white population, and small numbers of Black, Asian, and multiracial students. Nearly every student qualifies for free or reduced-price lunch, a figure that effectively reflects universal economic disadvantage in the school community. The data does not include IEP or English-learner counts, so the size of those special populations is not available here.
On the most recent state assessments, Cleveland's results paint a mixed picture. In English language arts, a slim majority of tested students reached proficiency, which is a reasonably strong outcome for a school serving this demographic profile and stands above what many similar middle schools in the state produce. Math is the clear soft spot, with only about a quarter of tested students scoring proficient or above. Science landed in between, with a moderate share of students demonstrating proficiency. A parent considering this school may want to look into how math instruction is structured and what supports are available for students working below grade level. Only one year of assessment data was available, so there is no trend to describe; whether these results represent a stable pattern or a single-year snapshot is not clear from the data provided.
The broader housing market in the school's zip code is relatively accessible compared with national figures. Home values sit near the state median and well below the national benchmark, and rents are modest. The monthly cost of renting is lower than the estimated monthly mortgage payment for a typical home, which means renting in this area is financially easier than buying for most households at current interest rates. Home values have moved only slightly over the past year, suggesting a stable rather than rapidly appreciating market.
Albuquerque's economy is anchored by Sandia National Laboratories and Kirtland Air Force Base on the southeast side, the University of New Mexico along the Central Avenue corridor, Presbyterian Healthcare Services, and a growing film and media sector that includes a Netflix production hub. The city's population has been roughly flat to slightly declining in recent years, with growth historically sprawling outward across the Northeast Heights, the West Side, and the Southeast Mesa. Publicly reported city priorities include affordable housing access. Albuquerque Public Schools, one of the larger districts in the country, operates schools spread across all quadrants rather than centralized. We searched for recent district-level policy, curriculum, or funding changes that might affect families at Cleveland and found nothing notable reported, so that area is left out rather than guessed.
Several pieces of information a parent might want were not available in the data provided. There are no discipline figures, no course-access or program listings, no staffing details, no attendance rates, and no civil-rights data for this school. The data also does not include a comparison set positioning Cleveland against neighboring schools in Bernalillo County. These gaps are common for individual school profiles and do not by themselves indicate anything about the school's performance in those areas. A family looking deeper would want to ask the school directly about its course offerings, extracurriculars, special education services, and any restorative or disciplinary practices.
What the available evidence says is this: Cleveland Middle is a mid-sized, economically disadvantaged, majority-Hispanic middle school in the Northeast Heights with solid reading outcomes, a clear weakness in math, and a science result that lands in the middle. For families in this neighborhood weighing their options, the reading results suggest the school is doing meaningful work in literacy, while the math results are an area worth pressing on.
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