Charles W. Eliot Middle: The scores are below where anyone wants them. Here's what they don't tell you.
Charles W. Eliot posts low test scores — and the returning cohort gains more here than at most schools between grade 6 and grade 8. If this is your zoned school, the numbers below are where to start a conversation, not where to end one.
| Scope | % Exceeded | % Met+ | Growth (2023 G6 → 2025 G8) | Absence | Suspension | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| This school | 24 | 7% | 23% | Above avg · p74 | 31.1% | 13.3% |
| CA average · Middle School | 39 | 17% | 40% | Average · p50 | 18.1% | 3.6% |
Charles W. Eliot Middle scores 24 of 100 on SchoolScope's Scope Score — the 24th percentile of 2,177 California middle schools (CDE CAASPP 2025).
Measures test performance, attendance, and climate — not arts, community, or your kid. How we score →
📈 On the Rise — Ask how many years the improvement has held, not just the latest one — one strong cohort and a real turnaround can look identical in a single year of data.
Most rating sites would stop at “23% proficient” and call it done. Charles W. Eliot deserves a closer read. The school sits in Altadena, where two-thirds of students qualify for free or reduced lunch — and reading the numbers without that context misreads the school.
Test scores are one lens, and at this school they're a rough one right now. The sections below show the fuller picture — including the parts that are working.
The seven-year arc
Climbed from the 8th to the 24th percentile since 2019 — past roughly 100 middle schools.
The pandemic drop is behind this school: 23% of students meet the standard today, above the 19% who did in 2019.
| Grade | 2019 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Grade 6 | 21% | 27% | 13% | 19% | 33% |
| Grade 7 | 28% | 28% | 27% | 18% | 29% |
| Grade 8 | 23% | 26% | 33% | 29% | 27% |
| Grade | 2019 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Grade 6 | 11% | 12% | 7% | 11% | 13% |
| Grade 7 | 16% | 16% | 14% | 9% | 18% |
| Grade 8 | 14% | 9% | 19% | 13% | 17% |
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 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 — and here the two measures disagree. Ours puts this school around the 74th percentile of California middle schools; the state's puts it around the 9th in reading and math together — a harder read than ours. We are not going to pretend one of those is the answer. Neither measure sees an individual child's classroom, and a disagreement this size is worth asking the principal about directly.
— 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 middle school lands at −1 in reading, and the middle half of them fall between −8 and +6 — 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 what changed in the last two years, and what the school is asking families for. Growth shows up in these numbers a year or two after it shows up in classrooms.
- Ask how the school follows up when a student starts missing days — chronic absence often starts outside the classroom, not inside it.
- Ask what typically leads to a suspension, and what happens before it gets there.
- 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 Charles W. Eliot Middle in Altadena, 25.7% of low-income students met or exceeded the ELA standard in 2025, compared to 35.5% district-wide and 38.2% statewide. Charles W. Eliot Middle trails its district average for low-income students by 9.8 percentage points in ELA. Other subgroups: Low-Income students (13.7% Math proficient); Hispanic students (24.3% ELA proficient). The largest proficiency gap is 18.5 percentage points for disabilities students. Data source: California Department of Education, CAASPP 2024-25. 262 students tested.
5 of 13 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 5.1pp from grade 6 to grade 8 at this school. District average: -3.0pp.
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 middle school — not against zero, and not against this school's all-students figure, because the state's expectation already differs by group.
— 1 more group is 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
The path below follows attendance boundaries — scores shown for each next step.
Feeder patterns derived from NCES attendance boundary data. Boundaries are approximate and may have changed — verify with your school district for current assignments.
The road from this school ends at John Muir High, which sent 17 graduates to UC campuses last fall and teaches 11 AP subjects. Those numbers describe past cohorts — a child starting here today would reach John Muir High around 2031, and 6 years is a long time for a school to hold still, and by the state's 2023 count 75% of John Muir High's graduates enrolled in college somewhere, UC or not.
The people teaching here
Pay is set by the district, not the school.
What gets spent here
$2,540 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
At 407 students, this school is much smaller than the typical California middle school (≈860).
On the state's science test (CAST), 15% 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 Charles W. Eliot Middle a good middle school?
What are Charles W. Eliot Middle's CAASPP test scores?
How does Charles W. Eliot Middle rank in California?
Is Charles W. Eliot Middle getting better or worse?
What is the attendance and school culture like at Charles W. Eliot Middle?
How does Charles W. Eliot Middle compare to other schools in Altadena?
How does Charles W. Eliot Middle serve low-income and underrepresented students?
Your other options
Nearby Elementary Schools
3 within ~3 mi · avg 57
Private alternatives nearby
Private schools within ~10 miles. These schools do not participate in state testing and cannot be scored or ranked.
A low score doesn't tell the whole story. Read: Your School Scored Low — Here's What That Actually Means
Every number on this page
Score factors, grade-level breakdowns, subgroup proficiency, and nearest schools.
| ELA | Tested | EXC | MET | NEAR | NOT | MET+ | +/CA |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Grade 6 | 128 | 13% | 20% | 27% | 40% | 33% | −13 |
| Grade 7 | 90 | 10% | 19% | 30% | 41% | 29% | −19 |
| Grade 8 | 109 | 3% | 24% | 28% | 46% | 27% | −20 |
| Math | Tested | EXC | MET | NEAR | NOT | MET+ | +/CA |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Grade 6 | 128 | 5% | 8% | 27% | 61% | 13% | −22 |
| Grade 7 | 91 | 9% | 9% | 15% | 67% | 18% | −16 |
| Grade 8 | 109 | 5% | 13% | 15% | 68% | 17% | −15 |
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 | 109 | 2% | 13% | 64% | 21% |
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 | 262 | 25.7% | −10 | −13 |
| Hispanic/Latino | 177 | 24.3% | −13 | −15 |
| Black/African American | 78 | 15.4% | −12 | −17 |
| School | Dist | Scope | EXC | MET+ | Grade gap | Cohort growth | Susp |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Charles W. Eliot Middle ← | — | 24 | 7.3% | 22.6% | −0.6pp | +52 pts | 13.3% |
| Octavia E. Butler Magnet | 1.2 mi | 30 | 13.2% | 29.9% | −9.8pp | — | 5.0% |
| California average | — | 39 | 17.2% | 40.0% | +1.5pp | — | 3.6% |
| Year | Scope | Pctile | Rank | Exc | Met+ | Absent | Susp | Grade gap |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | 17 | 8 | #1850 | 6.4% | 18.8% | 12.8% | 18.2% | +1.7pp |
| 2022 | 17 | 12 | #1911 | 4.9% | 19.8% | 34.9% | 13.4% | -1.9pp |
| 2023 | 19 | 21 | #1723 | 7.0% | 19.0% | 32.4% | 8.9% | +15.9pp |
| 2024 | 20 | 12 | #1944 | 5.0% | 16.4% | 32.3% | 13.5% | +5.9pp |
| 2025 | 24 | 24 | #1702 | 7.3% | 22.6% | 31.1% | 13.3% | -0.6pp |
- — Low-income students here trail the state average for their group by 13 points in ELA — worth asking how the school is closing that gap.
| Group | 2019 | 2025 | Δ |
|---|---|---|---|
| Female | 9.8% | 31.4% | +21.6pp |
| Male | 15.8% | 31.9% | +16.1pp |
| Black/African American | 16.4% | 30.4% | +14.0pp |
| Hispanic/Latino | 11.8% | 35.2% | +23.4pp |
| Two or More Races | 11.8% | 20.0% | +8.2pp |
| Students with Disabilities | 27.0% | 33.7% | +6.7pp |
| English Learners | 23.3% | 34.6% | +11.3pp |
| Foster Youth | 60.0% | — | — |
| Homeless | 13.9% | — | — |
| Socioeconomically Disadvantaged | 14.1% | 35.5% | +21.4pp |
| All Students | 12.8% | 31.7% | +18.9pp |
| Group | Reading | n | CDE band | Math | n | CDE band |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| All Students | −11 | 305 | Moderate | −24 | 306 | Minimal |
| Socioeconomically Disadvantaged | −13 | 246 | Moderate | −24 | 247 | Minimal |
| English Only | −11 | 220 | not categorised | −25 | 221 | not categorised |
| Hispanic or Latino | −15 | 164 | Moderate | −29 | 164 | Minimal |
| Black or African American | −17 | 74 | Moderate | −26 | 74 | Minimal |
| Students with Disabilities | −15 | 62 | Moderate | −26 | 62 | Minimal |
| English Learner | −15 | 50 | Moderate | −20 | 50 | Moderate |
| Recently Reclassified Fluent-English Proficient Only | −13 | 41 | not categorised | −26 | 41 | not categorised |
| White | −5 | 39 | Average | −20 | 39 | Moderate |
| Two or More Races | +22 | 11 | Exceptional | +12 | 11 | Accelerated |
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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