蜜桃影视

This article is part of Bright Spots, a series聽highlighting schools where every child learns to read, no matter their zip code. Explore the Bright Spots map to find out which schools are beating the odds in terms of literacy versus poverty rates.

This story is part of 蜜桃影视鈥檚 special coverage marking the 65th anniversary of the Los Angeles Unified School District. Read all our stories here.

When 蜜桃影视 started looking for schools that were doing a good job teaching kids to read, we began with the data. We crunched the numbers for nearly 42,000 schools across all 50 states and Washington, D.C. and identified 2,158 that were beating the odds by significantly outperforming what would be expected given their student demographics. 

Seeing all that data was interesting. But they were just numbers in a spreadsheet until we decided to out the results. And that geographic analysis revealed some surprising findings. 

For example, we found that, based on our metrics, two of the three highest-performing schools in California happened to be less than 5 miles apart from each other in Los Angeles. 

The Charter School came out No. 1 in the state of California. With 91% of its students in poverty, our calculations projected it would have a third grade reading rate of 27%. Instead, 92% of its students scored proficient or above. Despite serving a high-poverty student population, the school’s literacy scores were practically off the charts.  

PUC Milagro is a charter school, and charters tended to do well in our rankings. Nationally, they made up 7% of all schools in our sample but 11% of those that we identified as exceptional. 

But some district schools are also beating the odds. Just miles away from PUC Milagro is our No. 3-rated school in California, Hoover Street Elementary. It is a traditional public school run by the Los Angeles Unified School District. With 92% of its students qualifying for free- or reduced-price lunch, our calculations suggest that only 23% of its third graders would likely be proficient in reading. Instead, its actual score was 78%. 

For this project, we used data from 2024, and Hoover Street didn鈥檛 do quite as well in . (Milagro .)

Still, as Linda Jacobson reported last month, the district as a whole has been making impressive gains in reading and math over the last few years. In 2025, it reported its highest-ever performance on California鈥檚 state test. Moreover, those gains were broadly shared across the district鈥檚 most challenging, high-poverty schools. 

Our data showed that the district as a whole slightly overperformed expectations, based purely on the economic challenges of its students. We also found that, while Los Angeles is a large, high-poverty school district, it had a disproportionately large share of what we identified as the state’s 鈥渂right spot鈥� schools. L.A. accounted for 8% of all California schools in our sample but 16% of those that are the most exceptional. 

All told, we found 45 L.A. district schools that were beating the odds and helping low-income students read proficiently. Some of these were selective magnet schools, but many were not. 

INTERACTIVE

Map of Los Angeles Area Bright Spots

Some of the schools on the map may not meet most people鈥檚 definition of a good school, let alone a great one. For example, at Stanford Avenue Elementary, 47% of its third graders scored proficient in reading in 2024. That may not sound like very many, but 97% of its students are low-income, and yet it still managed to outperform the rest of the state by 4 percentage points. (It did even a bit better in .)

Schools like Stanford Avenue Elementary don鈥檛 have the highest scores in California. On the surface, they don鈥檛 look like they鈥檙e doing anything special. But that鈥檚 why it鈥檚 important for analyses like ours to consider a school鈥檚 demographics. High-poverty elementary schools that are doing a good job of helping their students learn to read deserve to be celebrated for their results.

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