Choosing where to send your child to high school can be a difficult decision, one made all the more challenging lately, thanks to tectonic shifts in the field of education. Which is to say that if you think high school means roaming the halls with a backpack full of books and notebook paper, you haven’t visited one lately.

Students these days barely need a backpack—let alone a locker—to accommodate the few school supplies they still possess; everything is stored in a cloud. Forget roaming the halls between classes with impunity; schools are under surveillance like never before. And when it comes to private high schools, there are experts who will tell you not to bother unless you’ve been coaching Junior since the womb.

For our inaugural Top Schools feature, we looked at the issues facing high schoolers today—from bullying to the ever-confusing TAKS test—and ran down the statistics for nearly every public and private high school in the greater Houston area. How do institutions match up in terms of SAT scores? Student-teacher ratios? Teacher education? You’ll find the answers to those questions and more in our Best High Schools grid.

Every child is different, and no set of statistics can determine the right high school for your child. But the information on the following pages may well make the decision easier. After all, you and your kids still have to decide on which languages to take, which fine arts to enroll in, which athletics to play, and plenty more. School’s in session.