Cerritos Elementary: This school runs ahead of the state average. The bar itself is the harder conversation.
Cerritos posts 49% meeting the standard against 43% statewide — ahead of most, with real headroom above the bar.
| Scope | % Exceeded | % Met+ | Growth (2023 G3 → 2025 G5) | Absence | Suspension | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| This school | 41 | 24% | 49% | Below avg · p43 | 12.3% | 1.3% |
| CA average · Elementary School | 39 | 21% | 43% | Average · p50 | 17.9% | 1.6% |
Cerritos Elementary scores 41 of 100 on SchoolScope's Scope Score — the 62nd percentile of 5,744 California elementary schools (CDE CAASPP 2025).
Measures test performance, attendance, and climate — not arts, community, or your kid. How we score →
🤝 Culture First — Ask whether the low absenteeism and suspension numbers come from what the school does or from the community it serves — both can produce the same numbers, and only a visit tells you which.
Most rating sites would stop at “49% proficient” and call it done. Cerritos deserves a closer read. The school sits in Anaheim, where two-thirds of students qualify for free or reduced lunch — and reading the numbers without that context misreads the school.
The seven-year arc
Has stayed near the 62nd percentile since 2019.
The pandemic drop is behind this school: 49% of students meet the standard today, above the 44% who did in 2019.
| Grade | 2019 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Grade 3 | 47% | 52% | 43% | 50% | 47% |
| Grade 4 | 48% | 52% | 38% | 42% | 54% |
| Grade 5 | 44% | 43% | 54% | 58% | 41% |
| Grade 6 | 53% | 54% | 47% | 55% | 59% |
| Grade | 2019 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Grade 3 | 46% | 56% | 46% | 60% | 63% |
| Grade 4 | 42% | 44% | 44% | 42% | 51% |
| Grade 5 | 34% | 37% | 48% | 40% | 37% |
| Grade 6 | 50% | 44% | 25% | 39% | 37% |
The story this school is actually telling
The school, grade by grade
ELA · CAASPP 2024–25Different students, same year — each bar is one grade's proficiency mix.
The honest read: the share exceeding rises 5.5pp across grades; the floor slips 6.2pp. The state average rises 4.6pp over the same span. A school visit and conversation with teachers will tell you more than this number.
The 6 things our score weighs
California's own answer to the same question
California runs its own growth model, following individual children in grades 4 through 8 rather than comparing school-wide averages the way we do. The two measures land in the same neighbourhood here — ours puts this school around the 43rd percentile of California elementary schools, the state's around the 31st in reading and math together. Two different methods agreeing is the most you can ask of one year of test data.
— pts vs expected is scale-score points above or below what California's model predicted for these same children from their own prior-year scores. It is not a percentage and not a percent of anything. A typical California elementary school lands at +2 in reading, and the middle half of them fall between −5 and +9 — the spread is wide, so read the rank, not the sign. CDE blends two consecutive years into each published figure, so adjacent years share input data and no year-over-year trend can honestly be drawn from them. It covers grades 4-8 only, and it is not part of the Scope Score — we assessed it and left it out: it tracks school demographics roughly three times as strongly as our own growth measure does, and one published year is not enough to test how stable it is.
Ask how the school challenges kids who clear the standard early. The gap between meeting and exceeding is where pacing shows.
- Ask what changes between grade 3 and grade 5 here, and who teaches the older kids.
- Ask whether the tour can step into a working classroom — watch how the teacher handles a student who's stuck.
- Ask to tour while school's in session, and notice how hallways and transitions feel — culture shows up between classes, not just in them.
- Ask how the school communicates with families when a child starts to struggle.
- Ask what a typical day looks like for a new student in the first few weeks.
How every group of students does here
At Cerritos Elementary in Anaheim, 41.5% of low-income students met or exceeded the ELA standard in 2025, compared to 46.8% district-wide and 38.2% statewide. Cerritos Elementary trails its district average for low-income students by 5.3 percentage points in ELA. Other subgroups: Low-Income students (41.5% Math proficient); Hispanic students (36.3% ELA proficient). The largest proficiency gap is 43.7 percentage points for disabilities students. Data source: California Department of Education, CAASPP 2024-25. 135 students tested.
8 of 16 student groups here are too small to report — a privacy protection, not a gap.
Change in proficiency from the lowest tested grade — which groups gain ground the longer they stay. Groups with fewer than 10 tested students per grade are not shown.
Low-income student ELA proficiency falls by 11.6pp from grade 3 to grade 5 at this school. District average: +10.6pp.
California follows these children individually and predicts each one's score from their own prior year. Each row is read against the same group at a typical California elementary school — not against zero, and not against this school's all-students figure, because the state's expectation already differs by group.
— 6 more groups are reported here with between 11 and 29 students. We hold those back on purpose: at that size the figure swings about 17 points on its own, and a quarter of such groups land past the state's top or bottom cut point by chance alone. They are listed with their student counts in the data appendix. — A group not listed at all had fewer than 11 students with a growth score, so California published nothing for it here. That is a privacy protection, not a judgment about those students. — Context only. None of this enters the Scope Score.
Showing up, and staying in class
Where the path goes
Cerritos Elementary serves grades TK-6. We don’t have attendance-boundary data showing which high school students here continue to, and we’d rather leave this blank than guess from whichever school happens to be nearest. The district office can tell you which high school your address is zoned for.
The people teaching here
Pay is set by the district, not the school.
What gets spent here
$177 per student arrives as federal Title funding — a measure of concentrated need, not school quality.
The district's current expense of education per student, from CDE's annual SACS filing — the freshest district spending figure the state publishes.
District-level, from the district's own SACS general-ledger filing — school-by-school breakdowns aren't published by the state.
Source: NCES F-33 · Full district breakdown →
The neighborhood it serves
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey 5-year estimates (2024) · ZIP-level
Transitional kindergarten is offered here — confirmed by actual Census Day enrollment, not just the listed grade span.
On the state's science test (CAST), 31% met or exceeded the standard — science is tested in grades 5 and 8 and once in high school, and it never enters the Scope Score.
Frequently asked questions
Is Cerritos Elementary a good elementary school?
What are Cerritos Elementary's CAASPP test scores?
How does Cerritos Elementary rank in California?
Is Cerritos Elementary getting better or worse?
What is the attendance and school culture like at Cerritos Elementary?
How does Cerritos Elementary compare to other schools in Anaheim?
How does Cerritos Elementary serve low-income and underrepresented students?
Your other options
Nearby Elementary Schools
3 within ~3 mi · avg 76
Nearby High Schools
3 within ~3 mi · avg 79
Private alternatives nearby
Private schools within ~10 miles. These schools do not participate in state testing and cannot be scored or ranked.
Every number on this page
Score factors, grade-level breakdowns, subgroup proficiency, and nearest schools.
| ELA | Tested | EXC | MET | NEAR | NOT | MET+ | +/CA |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Grade 3 | 49 | 20% | 27% | 29% | 24% | 47% | +4 |
| Grade 4 | 39 | 33% | 21% | 10% | 36% | 54% | +9 |
| Grade 5 | 54 | 26% | 15% | 17% | 43% | 41% | −7 |
| Grade 6 | 46 | 22% | 37% | 22% | 20% | 59% | +13 |
| Math | Tested | EXC | MET | NEAR | NOT | MET+ | +/CA |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Grade 3 | 49 | 20% | 43% | 12% | 24% | 63% | +18 |
| Grade 4 | 39 | 28% | 23% | 23% | 26% | 51% | +10 |
| Grade 5 | 54 | 15% | 22% | 20% | 43% | 37% | +2 |
| Grade 6 | 46 | 17% | 20% | 30% | 33% | 37% | +3 |
We show the grade rows CDE publishes for this school. A missing grade or dash can mean the school does not serve that grade, no valid result was published, or the tested group was too small to report. It does not mean zero.
| Science (CAST) | Tested | EXC | MET | NEAR | NOT |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Schoolwide | 54 | 6% | 26% | 46% | 22% |
CAST is tested in grades 5 and 8, then once in grade 10, 11, or 12. This row is the school's all-student aggregate. Not part of the Scope Score.
| Subgroup · ELA | Tested | MET+ | vs district | vs CA |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Socioeconomically Disadvantaged | 135 | 41.5% | −5 | +3 |
| Hispanic/Latino | 91 | 36.3% | −4 | −3 |
| Students with Disabilities | 29 | 13.8% | −3 | −3 |
| School | Dist | Scope | EXC | MET+ | Grade gap | Cohort growth | Susp |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cerritos Elementary ← | — | 41 | 23.9% | 48.9% | −16.2pp | +71 pts | 1.3% |
| Margaret Landell Elementary | 2.4 mi | 81 | 66.2% | 85.7% | +0.2pp | — | 0.1% |
| Patton Elementary | 1.4 mi | 77 | 56.9% | 80.3% | +11.0pp | — | 0.4% |
| Loyal Barker Elementary | 2.1 mi | 71 | 54.8% | 83.2% | −10.1pp | — | 0.5% |
| California average | — | 39 | 21.3% | 42.7% | −2.9pp | — | 1.6% |
| Year | Scope | Pctile | Rank | Exc | Met+ | Absent | Susp | Grade gap |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | 40 | 58 | #2303 | 21.2% | 43.6% | 4.6% | 1.0% | -7.0pp |
| 2022 | 42 | 68 | #1852 | 22.5% | 47.3% | 29.4% | 0.8% | -14.3pp |
| 2023 | 44 | 70 | #1734 | 25.4% | 45.6% | 21.0% | 0.6% | +6.3pp |
| 2024 | 44 | 66 | #1926 | 26.5% | 48.6% | 14.7% | 1.8% | -5.7pp |
| 2025 | 41 | 62 | #2203 | 23.9% | 48.9% | 12.3% | 1.3% | -16.2pp |
| Group | 2019 | 2025 | Δ |
|---|---|---|---|
| Female | 3.2% | 10.2% | +7.0pp |
| Male | 5.0% | 13.2% | +8.2pp |
| Asian | 1.6% | 8.0% | +6.4pp |
| White | 0.0% | 6.5% | +6.5pp |
| Hispanic/Latino | 5.2% | 12.2% | +7.0pp |
| Two or More Races | 4.5% | 22.2% | +17.7pp |
| Students with Disabilities | 8.0% | 16.2% | +8.2pp |
| English Learners | 2.2% | 9.2% | +7.0pp |
| Homeless | 11.1% | 22.0% | +10.9pp |
| Socioeconomically Disadvantaged | 5.8% | 13.6% | +7.8pp |
| All Students | 4.2% | 11.7% | +7.5pp |
| Group | Reading | n | CDE band | Math | n | CDE band |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| All Students | −6 | 134 | Moderate | −4 | 134 | Average |
| English Only | −6 | 103 | not categorised | −7 | 103 | not categorised |
| Socioeconomically Disadvantaged | −8 | 102 | Moderate | −3 | 102 | Average |
| Hispanic or Latino | −5 | 63 | Average | −9 | 63 | Moderate |
| Students with Disabilities | −24 | 40 | Minimal | −9 | 40 | Moderate |
| English Learner | −5 | 29 | Average | +7 | 29 | Accelerated |
| White | −9 | 24 | Moderate | −4 | 24 | Average |
| English Learners Only | −12 | 21 | not categorised | +9 | 21 | not categorised |
| Asian | −6 | 18 | Moderate | +10 | 18 | Accelerated |
| Filipino | −2 | 14 | Average | +11 | 14 | Accelerated |
| Homeless Youth | −18 | 14 | Moderate | −5 | 14 | Average |
Whole scale-score points above or below what CDE's model predicted for these same children from their own prior-year scores — not a percentage, not a percentile. Statewide a typical school lands near +1 with a spread of about 13 points either side, so read a figure against its group's own typical value, not against zero. Muted rows have fewer than 30 students with a growth score — published by CDE, held back from the narrative sections above because at that size the figure swings about 17 points on its own. “Not categorised” is CDE assigning no band — English Only, Recently Reclassified, and English Learners Only receive a value and no band, for every school in the state. It is not a missing number. Most figures blend two consecutive years, so adjacent published years share input data and no trend line can honestly be drawn across them. A group absent from this table had fewer than 11 students with a growth score and was never published. Grades 4-8 only. None of this enters the Scope Score — it is more strongly correlated with school demographics than our own growth measure, and one published year is not enough to test its reliability.
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