A few weeks ago, I looked at low-income middle schools to see which schools are the top performers. Now, let’s set our sights on Elementary Schools.
Elementary is kind of a loaded word.
Unlike middle school, there are several grades of elementary school that are not tested by the state test. Kindergartners, 1st and 2nd graders are not tested. Therefore, we cannot authentically say “this school is the best elementary school”. We can only say that they have a strong 3rd, 4th, 5th or 6th grade. And that brings us to the second reason the word :”elementary” is kind of tricky.
Some elementary schools are K-4, some are K-5 and some are K-6. As a result, some schools have 2 years of data while others have 4. I am going to bring this up again later, so just keep it in mind.
Finally, I am only looking at Low-Income elementary schools. Remember than we are defining Low-Income schools as schools with 80% or higher free or reduced price lunch. This is the common indicator of poverty in schools, and 80% is a commonly used number.
So Low-Income Elementary Schools – Who does it best? Here are the top 20 in English and Math.
The red schools are charter schools, while blue schools are district schools.
Much like middle schools, KIPP dominates the top of the list. Unlike middle school however, where KIPP had a couple schools that didn’t make the list, when it comes to elementary schools, all of KIPP’s schools that have testing grades make the top 20.
Another trend is that two of the top schools on both lists are Dual Language Immersion schools. Castelar (Mandarin Immersion) and PUC Milagro (Spanish Immersion) have some of the highest success in English scores, despite spending a significant portion of their school day in another language. And it seems to benefit math as well.
But more surprising is how many LAUSD district schools are on this list. Vena Avenue, recently highlighted in the LA Daily News, performed very well. Hoover Street, Toluca Lake, Chapman, Allessandro, Maywood and Brainard all made both lists. It seems that there are a lot of successful low-income elementary schools in LA that we should be looking at.
In fact, low-income elementary schools in LAUSD are only barely outperformed by charter schools in English and Math when looking at median scores:
A 5% difference? That’s nothing to write home about. Low-Income charter schools on the whole are not outperforming their LAUSD counterparts by all that much.
Sure, KIPP is a beast. And dual language immersion hold a lot of promise. But for traditional, regular old elementary schools – there are some really good models of success within LAUSD. Superintendent Michelle King has made it her mission to highlight the successes inside of the district. These schools are one place to look.