A neighbor-by-neighbor look at ELA and Math proficiency for every LAUSD and SMMUSD campus serving Venice, Santa Monica, Mar Vista, Playa Vista, and Marina del Rey - plus every public charter and magnet in the area.

Every spring, kids across California take the CAASPP - the Smarter Balanced tests in English Language Arts (ELA) and Math. The state reports the % of students who Met or Exceeded Standard. It's an imperfect measure, but it's the same test everyone takes and it's the closest thing we have to an apples-to-apples snapshot.

Quick note before we dive in: we're genuinely lucky over here. Whatever the numbers say on any given year, our little slice of the Westside has an incredible bench of public schools, and behind every one of these campuses are teachers, principals, aides, office staff, custodians, coaches, and parent volunteers showing up for our kids every day. That's the part a test score will never capture. Big thanks to all of them.

Below: every traditional public school, magnet, and charter serving Venice, Santa Monica, Mar Vista, Playa Vista, and Marina del Rey, ranked by academics per grade level, with neighborhood context. Data source: CAASPP results dashboard by EdSource (state test scores, released fall 2025 for the 2024-25 school year). FRPM (free/reduced-price meals) % from CDE 2023-24, a rough proxy for socioeconomic mix.

Ranked by average of ELA + Math % Met/Exceeded Standard.

*ICEF Vista Elementary is a Title 1 charter school; the state's 2023-24 FRPM file lists 1% for this campus, which appears to be a data error - the affiliated ICEF Vista Middle next door is 96.6%.

Westside Global Awareness elementary grades (3-5) tested well below its middle-school grades this year - see middle school table for 6-8 numbers.

Including two schools outside our coverage area that Westside parents regularly commute to.

The table's a useful starting point, but a lot of these schools have context that a percentage doesn't capture. A few worth zooming in on:

Broadway hosts the only Mandarin-English immersion program on the Westside (launched 2010) and a Spanish-English immersion strand, both 50/50 model (Broadway Elementary). Parents have been known to camp overnight to enroll their kids, and the school pulls families from Manhattan Beach, the Valley, and even Orange County.

The community that shows up for a school built around dual-language literacy - Mandarin and Spanish - tends to be, let's just say, deeply engaged in academic outcomes. Some call it a "tiger parent" school - not as an insult, more as shorthand for the reality that after-school Kumon, weekend Chinese school, and 6 a.m. flashcards are part of the culture for many families here. That's a real thing to know before you enroll. It's also why Broadway's ELA score (85.3) is tied for the highest of any elementary in the region and its math (79.4) beats every LAUSD school in West LA. The school does not receive extra funding for the immersion model - it's mostly run on parent effort (Friends of Broadway).

The Braddock connection: Braddock Drive runs the same LAUSD Mandarin 50/50 immersion model - it was actually launched in 2016 partly to relieve pressure on Broadway (ABC7), designed to mirror Broadway's program. Same parent nonprofit (DragonSprouts) supports both. So while Braddock's overall school-wide score reflects a higher-FRPM student body (61.6%), the immersion strand pulls a similar deeply-engaged parent culture - expect the same Kumon/Chinese school energy. It's a factor if you're weighing Braddock for the immersion program specifically vs. the general track.

Coeur d'Alene's ELA score went from 69.1% to 79.7% in a single year - a +10.65-point jump, the largest of any school in our coverage area. Math climbed 4 points too. Principal Sophia Fang took over at the start of the 2024-25 school year, and this is her first full-year cohort. One data point isn't a trend, but it's an unusually big move and worth watching. If you're deciding between neighborhood schools right now, Coeur d'Alene is the one where momentum is on the board. (A full Venice Rising school profile on CDA is coming soon.)

Westminster is the Westminster Math/Tech/Environmental Studies Magnet (LAUSD School Directory). It's a Title 1 school; a large share of students are bussed in from other neighborhoods that don't have the same magnet resources (Argonaut coverage). The FRPM % (77.9) reflects the whole student population the school serves, not just the neighborhood around it.

In April 2025, Westminster was named a Top Magnet School of Excellence by Magnet Schools of America - the national association's highest honor, given to a small group of magnet schools nationally each year (Westminster announcement, LAUSD Board District 4). It was the school's first time even applying.

Here's what a ranking table won't tell you: Westminster is one of the most highly sought-after magnet applications on the Westside. The garden program is legendary. The tech and environmental science curriculum is real. Both ELA and Math scores went up by roughly 4 points this year even as the school served a very high-need student body. If you're looking at "value-add" - meaning how much a school moves the needle for the kids in front of it - Westminster is doing more with less than almost any school on this list.

Mark Twain's 58.5% ELA looks middle-of-the-pack until you realize it's actually four different schools under one roof (Mark Twain admissions):

The published test score is an average of all four plus the general track. The SAS and IHP cohorts are testing much higher than the school-wide number; the language immersion cohort tests very differently again. Twain's overall ELA jumped +7.3 points year-over-year, which is one of the biggest gains of any middle school in our area - a real signal. We covered the tracks in more depth in our middle schools guide if you're mid-decision.

Both show up on almost every Westside parent's shortlist, and both are magnets that Westside kids commute to:

About the commute - it's more manageable than most parents realize:

Both schools score above Lincoln Middle in math but not in ELA - so you're trading commute time for a math bump, mostly, plus the magnet culture and college pipeline.

One more to know about: New West Charter in Palms is a 6-12 charter that pulls a lot of Westside families - 73.7% ELA and 44.2% Math in 2025, FRPM 19.8%. Not in our coverage area, but it's in the shortlist conversation with LACES and Paul Revere for middle and high school, especially for families west of the 405.

Ánimo Venice (Green Dot, on Broadway St in Venice) and the ICEF Vista schools (Mar Vista) primarily serve low-income kids - Ánimo's FRPM is 90.3%, ICEF Vista Middle's is 96.6%. Raw score-to-score, they don't stack up against Franklin or Broadway. But look at the year-over-year movement:

These are schools worth watching if you care about which programs are actually moving the needle for the students they serve, not just which zip codes test well.

You probably noticed the FRPM % column tends to move opposite the test scores. Across all schools here, the correlation between % of kids on free/reduced lunch and combined proficiency is -0.82. In plain English: the more affluent the student body, the higher the school tests, almost every time.

A few schools break the pattern:

These outliers are the schools where something other than zip code is going on - leadership, magnet pull, parent engagement, program design. Those are the interesting ones.

Fair question. The answer isn't "smarter kids." It's mostly money and how school funding works in California.

SMMUSD is what's called a "Basic Aid" or "community-funded" district - meaning it gets to keep local property tax revenue instead of sending it up to Sacramento for redistribution. Because Santa Monica's property tax base is huge, that alone puts SMMUSD about $19 million above what it would receive under California's normal school funding formula (Santa Monica Daily Press).

Then Santa Monica voters piled on:

Total: roughly $50 million per year in "other local funding" that state-dependent districts like LAUSD simply don't have access to. That's about 35% of SMMUSD's general fund (SMDP).

Practically what that means: smaller class sizes, more counselors, retained arts/music programs, more classroom aides, working HVAC, actual librarians. LAUSD schools serving comparable kids don't have any of those things at the same level, because LAUSD is a district that mostly runs on state funding under the Local Control Funding Formula - which is designed to be equitable across California, not generous to any specific neighborhood.

The California state PPIC's research on this is unambiguous: parcel taxes and community-funded status produce meaningful per-pupil funding differences of hundreds to thousands of dollars per kid, per year (PPIC report). Over a K-12 career, that's meaningful.

So when you look at that -0.82 correlation between FRPM % and test scores, remember there's a second correlation underneath it: the districts that serve wealthier communities can also raise more money locally to keep serving them well. Santa Monica passes parcel taxes. LAUSD serves 400,000+ kids and can't run a parcel tax at a scale that matters. The gap compounds.

None of this is a knock on Santa Monica voters - they've clearly decided public schools are worth taxing themselves for, over and over. It's just an honest answer to "why do the scores look like this."

Everything here is on the state's site - we just did the sorting and added the context.

Sources: CAASPP Smarter Balanced spring 2025 results, EdSource CAASPP database, CDE Free/Reduced Price Meal Data 2023-24, SMMUSD 2025-26 preliminary budget, PPIC parcel tax research, Magnet Schools of America 2025 awards. Enrollment and grade-span data via the CDE Public Schools Directory.