South Lake Middle: The state doesn't publish enough data to score this school fairly.
South Lake is a middle school in Irvine. The state doesn't publish enough data to score it fairly — so we won't. Here's what we can show.
No Scope Score available
California doesn't publicly report per-grade test results when fewer than 11 students are tested in a grade — a privacy protection for small schools. We can't compute a Scope Score without that data.
California's own answer to the same question
California runs its own growth model — it follows individual children in grades 4 through 8 and compares each one against a prediction from their own prior scores. On that measure this school sits well above the middle of California middle schools in reading and math together. We show it; we don't score it.
— 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.
With little published data, a visit does the heavy lifting: ask about class sizes, teacher tenure, and where last year's students went next.
- Ask about typical class sizes and the student-teacher ratio.
- Ask how long teachers have stayed at the school.
- Ask where recent graduates or transfers went next.
- Ask whether the tour can step into a working classroom, and watch how a lesson actually runs.
How every group of students does here
At South Lake Middle in Irvine, 57.6% of low-income students met or exceeded the ELA standard in 2025, compared to 58.6% district-wide and 38.2% statewide. South Lake Middle trails its district average for low-income students by 1.0 percentage points in ELA. Other subgroups: Low-Income students (45.4% Math proficient); Asian students (78.9% ELA proficient). The largest proficiency gap is 59.0 percentage points for english learner students. Data source: California Department of Education, CAASPP 2024-25. 217 students tested.
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.
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.
— 3 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.
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 Woodbridge High, which sent 78 graduates to UC campuses last fall and teaches 28 AP subjects. Those numbers describe past cohorts — a child starting here today would reach Woodbridge High around 2031, and 6 years is a long time for a school to hold still, and by the state's 2023 count 90% of Woodbridge 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
$257 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
On the state's science test (CAST), 58% 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.
Your other options
Nearby Elementary Schools
3 within ~3 mi · avg 81
Nearby High Schools
3 within ~3 mi · avg 78
Private alternatives nearby
Private schools within ~10 miles. These schools do not participate in state testing and cannot be scored or ranked.
SchoolScope scores and verdicts are our interpretation of public California Department of Education data — independent analysis, not an official rating. How we analyze · Request a correction