(The Center Square)–Ten percent of the top 100 high schools in the country are in Texas, according to a U.S. News 2025-2026 Best High Schools Rankings.
The rankings assessed nearly 18,000 public high schools in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Rankings are based on six factors based on state assessments performance and how well students are prepared for college, the report says.
Eight of Texas’ top 10 high schools are magnet schools; two are open-enrollment charter schools. Magnet schools offer theme-based curriculum in specific subjects, teachers receive specialized training and students are required to apply in a selective application process. There are currently 270 magnet public schools in Texas serving nearly 210,000 students, according to Public School Review.
Open-enrollment charter schools are public schools that use a non-selective application process, including a lottery system. There are currently 1,057 public charter schools in Texas serving more than 484,000 students, according to Public School Review.
The report ranked 1,578 public high schools in Texas. Six of the top 10 are in north Texas; the top three are in Dallas ISD. Four of the top 10 are in Austin, Houston and San Antonio.
The top schools have small enrollments, small student to teacher ratios and 100% or near 100% graduation rates. Students also report 100%, or near 100%, proficiency in math, reading and science, take Advanced Placement classes and classes at local universities.
Ranking first is the School for the Talented and Gifted (TAG), a magnet college prep school for gifted students in Dallas ISD. It has 546 students enrolled in grades 9-12. It ranks 9th best overall and 33rd best among science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) high schools nationwide.
Ranking second best is the Irma Lerma Rangel Young Women’s Leadership School, a magnet school in Dallas ISD, with 292 students enrolled in grades 6-12. It ranks 15th best in the country.
Ranking third best is the School of Science and Engineering, a magnet college prep school n Dallas ISD. It has 495 students enrolled in grades 9-12. It ranks 23rd best overall and 46th best among STEM high schools nationwide.
Ranking fourth best is the Liberal Arts and Science Academy, a magnet school in Austin ISD, with 1,518 students enrolled in grades 9-12. It ranks 36th best overall and 74th best among STEM high schools nationwide. LASA offers 30 AP and 121 honors classes that “are designed to be more challenging than what the state and district require,” the report states.
Ranking fifth best is Carnegie Vanguard High School, a magnet school in Houston ISD, with 824 students enrolled in grades 9-12. It ranks 42nd best nationwide. Students are required to take at least 10 AP classes and complete 100 hours of community service and “consistently exceed state and national averages on SAT and ACT exams,” the report notes.
Ranking sixth best is Grand Prairie Collegiate Institute, a charter school in Grand Prairie ISD, with 135 students enrolled in grades 6-12. It ranks 54th overall and 13th best among charter high schools nationwide. All students take AP classes; 92% of students are minorities.
Ranking seventh best is BASIS San Antonio-Shavano Campus, a charter school with 348 students enrolled in grades 6-12. It ranks 58th overall, 14th best among charter schools and 18th best among STEM high schools nationwide. All students take AP classes; 88% are minorities.
Ranking eighth best is DeBakey High School for Health Professions, a magnet school in Houston ISD located in the Texas Medical Center. It ranks 75th nationwide and second best in the Houston area. Its 922 students are enrolled in grades 9-12. Graduates are eligible for the Houston Premedical Academy, an undergraduate program at the University of Houston. Those selected receive provisional acceptance to Baylor College of Medicine.
Ranking ninth best is Judge Barefoot Sanders Law Magnet in Dallas ISD, ranking 84th nationwide. Its 480 students are enrolled in grades 9-12. The overwhelming majority are minorities (94%) and economically disadvantaged (83%).
Ranking 10th best is the Talkington School for Young Women Leaders, a magnet school in Lubbock ISD. It ranks 95th nationwide. It has 231 students enrolled in grades 6-12.
Rounding out the top 20 public schools in Texas are the Young Women’s Leadership Academy in San Antonio ISD, Hector J Garcia Early College Highschool in Laredo ISD, School of Health Professions in Dallas ISD, Westlake Academy Charter School, IDEA McAllen College Preparatory, Health Careers High School in Northside ISD in San Antonio, Richards School for Young Women Leaders in Austin ISD, Challenge Early College High School in Houston ISD, IDEA Frontier College Preparatory in Brownsville and IDEA Quest College Preparatory in Edinburg.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
