The 10 Best Elementary Schools on LA's Westside (2026)

You live on the Westside — or you're thinking about moving there. You've Googled "best elementary schools" and gotten a dozen listicles that all cite GreatSchools ratings without questioning what those ratings actually measure.

On this page▾

The top 10What stands outJust outside the top 10What the numbers can't tell youSample size and limitationsHow to actually get your kid into these schools

Here's a different approach, starting with the rule we used, so you can check our work. There's no official Westside, so we picked ten zip codes: 90024, 90025, 90034, 90064, 90066, 90291, 90292, 90402, 90403, 90404. Every elementary school with a 2025 CAASPP score and an address in one of those ten is on the list. We didn't filter out anything else. That comes to 30 schools, all of them run through our Scope Score methodology and ranked, and the results include some surprises.

The top 10

Score is our Scope Score (0–100). Exceeded % is our own number: the average of the English and math shares of students scoring above the state standard, not just meeting it, across grades 3 through 5. The state reports the two subjects separately, so you won't find this exact figure on a CDE report. Growth compares the school's 2025 fifth graders against its own 2023 third graders. That's nominally the same class two years on, but families move in and out, so it isn't the same list of children. We show where that comparison lands against a typical California elementary school. Absent % is chronic absenteeism. All data from 2025 CAASPP and CDE reporting. Full methodology →

What stands out

Overland Avenue ranks among the highest-scoring schools in California

Not just on the Westside. Not just in LA. Overland Avenue Elementary ranks #27 in the entire state on our Scope Score, with a Scope Score of 86. Over 70% of students exceed the state standard. Chronic absenteeism is 6.6%, the lowest on this list.

This is an LAUSD neighborhood school in the 90064 zip code. Not a charter. Not a magnet. Not a school that selects its students. Its test data is striking — and it may not be widely known outside the immediate neighborhood.

If you live in Overland Avenue's attendance area, you might already have access to a top-30 school in California without knowing it. See the full profile →

Edison shows the biggest two-year jump on this list

Edison is 5th overall. It also has the widest gap here between its 2025 fifth graders and its own 2023 third graders — those fifth graders landed well above where a typical California elementary school's fifth graders land. No other school on this list shows a gap that wide.

Its exceeded rate is 50.4%, the lowest in the top five. So Edison has fewer students scoring above the bar than Overland or Clover do, and the widest two-year gap on the list. If your kid is somewhere in the middle right now, ask about that on a tour: what does 4th grade look like for a child who's close to standard but not over it?

One limit to hold onto. Those are two different classes of children, tested two years apart. All the comparison says is that the later class scored higher. It doesn't say the school moved any particular child, and it isn't a forecast about next year. See the full profile →

Clover Avenue: high exceeded rate, ordinary two-year gap

Clover Avenue in Palms (90034) has 65.6% of students exceeding the standard, second highest on this list. Its fifth-grade-to-third-grade gap sits right at typical for a California elementary school.

So a lot of students here score well above the bar, and the gap between the two classes is unremarkable. That's not a knock — nearly two-thirds exceeding the standard is a hard thing to do. But if your kid already finds the work easy, ask on a tour what happens to them in 4th and 5th grade. See the full profile →

Broadway Elementary: the data tells two stories

Broadway in Venice (90291) has a 64% exceeded rate — the third highest on this list. On a rating that only shows "met or exceeded," it would look fantastic.

But chronic absenteeism is 18.2%, tied for the highest here, and its two-year gap sits at typical rather than above it. So a lot of kids score well, and close to one in five miss enough school to be counted chronically absent. It still ranks in our top 10 because the raw achievement is so high. Visit the school. Ask about attendance. See the full profile →

Coeur D'Alene Avenue: the other Venice school

Coeur D'Alene sits in the same Venice zip code as Broadway, in the same district, with the same 18.2% chronic absenteeism. Then the two schools split.

Broadway has the higher exceeded rate, 64% against Coeur D'Alene's 51%. Coeur D'Alene has the wider two-year gap: above typical, where Broadway's is flat. More Broadway students clear the bar; more of the difference at Coeur D'Alene shows up between its younger and older classes.

Neither school has solved attendance, and that's the number to raise on both tours. Ask what Venice families are up against on a Tuesday morning, and what the school does about it. See the full profile →

The higher-spending district doesn't come out on top

District budgets on the Westside are far apart. Santa Monica-Malibu Unified spends $24,954 per student in current operating costs. Beverly Hills Unified spends $29,437. LAUSD, which runs 8 of the 10 schools on this list, spends $22,606. (NCES, FY2023 current expenditures.)

Set those budgets against the ranking and they don't line up at all. The #1 school belongs to the lowest-spending of the three districts, about $2,300 per pupil below Santa Monica-Malibu.

Read that carefully, though, because it's a district number sitting next to a school result. Nobody publishes what an individual campus spends, so we can't tell you what Overland Avenue's budget is, what Franklin's is, or what either one buys with it. All the comparison rules out is the shortcut — you can't look up a district's per-pupil figure and assume the schools inside it rank in that order.

The Santa Monica schools: strong, and not where you'd expect

Two Santa Monica-Malibu schools make this list, and both land high: Franklin at #2 and Edison at #5. Franklin's 57.7% exceeded rate is only fourth here. What lifts it is the two-year gap, the second widest on the list after Edison's.

The third Santa Monica-Malibu school in these ten zip codes, Roosevelt, lands 12th, just off the table.

Two of the district's three schools in the top five is a strong showing by any reading. Neither is first. The top spot on the Westside belongs to an LAUSD neighborhood school, so if you were using "better district" as a shortcut to "better school," this list won't do that work for you.

You don't need a lottery to reach the top of this list

All ten of these schools serve a neighborhood attendance boundary. One of them, Canyon Charter at #4, is also a charter — specifically an LAUSD affiliated charter, which is a district school with extra freedom over its own program that still has a resident boundary to serve. Charter and neighborhood school are not opposites here. No magnet made the top 10; the magnet in these zip codes, Westside Global Awareness Magnet, scored 34, which puts it 28th of the 30 schools we scored.

That answers the worry a lot of Westside parents start with — that the good schools are all behind a lottery. The top three are boundary schools, two of them LAUSD. In most of these zip codes, the school you're already assigned to is the strongest option on the list.

Just outside the top 10

A ranked list makes every line between two numbers look equally real. This one isn't. #10 sits 1.8 points clear, and then three schools land inside a third of a point of each other:

• Westwood Charter Elementary (90025) — Score 68, a charter in Westwood. 51.3% exceeded, growth a little above typical. Profile →
• Roosevelt Elementary (90403) — Score 68, Santa Monica-Malibu. 47.4% exceeded, growth a little above typical. Profile →
• Richland Avenue Elementary (90064) — Score 68, same zip code as #1 Overland Avenue. Its exceeded rate is 46.2%, well under Overland's, but its growth runs above typical. Profile →

Before rounding, those three score 68.41, 68.17 and 68.14 — 0.27 of a point covers all of them. Treat them as one tier, not as 11th, 12th and 13th. Fairburn Avenue Elementary (90024) sits further back at 63 — a 55.3% exceeded rate, but growth below typical and 16.3% chronic absenteeism pulled the score down. Profile →

What the numbers can't tell you

Every school on this list has things test scores miss:

• School culture. Two schools with nearly identical numbers can feel completely different to walk into. We have nothing that measures this, and we're not going to guess at it from a spreadsheet. Go stand outside at pickup and watch.
• Diversity. We do have this one. The state publishes CAASPP results broken out by race, ethnicity, English learner status and family income; we import it, and every school profile shows it in the Community Profile. What we don't do is fold it into the Scope Score. Equity gaps belong in front of you, not buried inside a number that averages them away. Open any profile linked above and scroll down.
• Special programs — dual language, gifted, arts integration — differ by school and matter enormously for specific kids. Our Scope Score doesn't weight these because they're not in the test data.
• After-school care and enrichment. Not in any file we have. Call the front office and ask what's offered, what it costs, and how late it runs. For a working parent that answer can outweigh everything in the table above.

Everything here narrows the list. Standing in the building is what decides it.

Sample size and limitations

A few things to keep in mind when reading this list:

• Scores are based on 2025 CAASPP data. This is the most recent available as of this writing. One year's data can be noisy, especially for smaller schools.
• Small schools are more volatile. Every school here is small in testing terms, so a handful of kids can move a school's numbers. Richland Avenue tested 107 students across grades 3 through 5. Overland tested 219, and Franklin, the largest here, tested 286.
• The growth column follows classes, not children. We compare a school's 2025 fifth graders with its own 2023 third graders. Nominally that's the same class two years on, but families move in and out, so it isn't the same list of kids. All it can tell you is that the later class scored higher, or lower, than the earlier one. It can't tell you the school caused the difference, and it can't tell you what next year will look like.
• Your Westside may not be our ten zip codes. Ours are listed at the top. If a neighborhood you'd count is missing, that's why. Explore all LA elementary schools →

How to actually get your kid into these schools

Start with the boundary. For every school here — all ten, Canyon Charter included — the attendance area is the main door. For the LAUSD schools, type your street address into the district's Resident School Identifier and it tells you which school you're assigned to. If you're weighing a move, do that before you sign the lease, not after.

Then know that living in the area starts the enrollment, it doesn't finish it. Canyon Charter's packet is a fair example of what a school asks for: proof of residence (a property tax statement or a lease), your child's original birth certificate, your ID, immunization records, and a utility bill. Districts can also place a child elsewhere when a grade level is full. So ask the office one question early — what happens if the grade is full when we apply?

Canyon Charter (#4) is a charter with a boundary. It's an LAUSD affiliated charter, which means if you live inside its lines you enroll directly; packets come out in mid-March and there's no lottery for you. The lottery is for families outside the boundary, and only when more of them apply than the school has seats. Those applications run through LAUSD's Unified Enrollment, with a deadline in mid-November for the following school year and a late waitlist window after that.

Then tour. A school that ranks #1 on our list might not be the right fit for your kid. And a school that ranks #15 might be exactly what they need. The data gives you a starting point. The visit gives you the rest.

Explore all schools on SchoolScope →