@mathanxiety - that’s actually where I lived. The public schools in that particular location are indeed generally very good, in part due to the large number of (wealthy) expats and wealthier people in general. Also they’re very big on the testing - the teaching is going more toward achieving results than learning and the pay is crap so things aren’t improving. They are also fairly anal about attendance because of the funding model I think - an expat friend was moving home and took her kids out for a day or to go look for a new home and the principal tried to tell her she wasn’t allowed (even knowing the kids were being pulled in a couple of weeks and leaving the country permanently anyway!)
The woodlands is a (pretty nice) bubble - first time I saw it, I thought stepford wives (in the woodlands you have to get pre-approval to repaint your front door/house/fix a fence that blew over, and they have inspectors that drive around looking into the gardens for infractions). even in the bubble there’s an undercurrent which I’m glad my son isn’t going to be exposed to long term. literally a mile away is one of the very poorest black neighbourhoods where they get blamed for not being able to put in their own water system (it’s a slave descendant community - wonder why they’re poor?). In Houston the schools are really hit and miss and I’ve read about a lot of resentment over measures the education board tries to make things more even (distribution of funding, busing students from disadvantaged neighbourhoods into top schools).
Montgomery county commissioners (I think that’s the right one, not the town council) have also just voted to cut funding to meals on wheels for elderly, the women’s shelter, and children’s services. Montgomery county court particularly is known to be very old boy system and chauvinistic - that’s coming from lawyers in Houston (Harris county).
greenspoint (about halfway between the woodlands and Houston proper) is nicknamed Gunspoint. If you’re going to get to know locals it’s definitely on all the expat minds that I know that you’ll likely have to ask about guns in the house if you’re going to have play dates. I often worried about driving in case someone would have a gun in their car.
Houston proper hasn’t got zoning and so really nice houses can have junkyards or abandoned lots immediately next to them. We were told that if we lived in the city it wasn’t safe to go jogging alone in the evening and that we should also get an alarm system. Even in the woodlands area there’s a fair amount of crime.
The driving is also bad - I got rear ended twice in two years while stopped at a traffic light/stop sign. They have signs telling you how many people have died on the highway because it’s so high.