Aragon Avenue Elementary vs Charles H. Kim Elementary

Aragon Avenue Elementary and Charles H. Kim Elementary are both Los Angeles elementary schools serving kindergarten through fifth grade, but they sit at opposite ends of California's quality distribution. Charles H. Kim Elementary holds an overall rating of 9.6/10 versus Aragon Avenue Elementary's 8.9/10, and that gap compounds dramatically in state rank: Kim Elementary sits at #9 of 9,533 California schools while Aragon Avenue Elementary ranks #276 — still a top-3% placement, but a world away from Kim's near-perfect standing.

The sharpest difference between the two schools is academic proficiency. Charles H. Kim Elementary scores 9.5/10 on academics against Aragon Avenue Elementary's 7.4/10 — a 2.1-point delta that reflects meaningfully higher tested achievement. The one category where Aragon Avenue flips the script is student growth: Aragon Avenue Elementary earns a 10.0/10 growth score versus Kim Elementary's 9.8/10. That near-perfect growth score signals that Aragon Avenue's teachers are producing above-expected learning gains given where students start — an important signal for families who weight trajectory over absolute scores.

Aragon Avenue Elementary enrolls 216 students compared to Charles H. Kim Elementary's 472, making it a considerably smaller campus. Aragon Avenue's student-teacher ratio is 21.6:1 versus Kim's 18.2:1, meaning Kim actually offers more adults per student despite being twice as large. Both schools serve economically similar populations — free and reduced-price lunch eligibility sits at 94% at Aragon Avenue and 88% at Kim — so neither school's higher scores can be attributed to a more affluent student body.

Both schools cover the same grade span, KG–05, and sit just 5.0 miles apart within Los Angeles. The practical distinction is that Charles H. Kim Elementary combines elite academic outcomes with a favorable teacher ratio at greater enrollment scale, while Aragon Avenue Elementary's standout growth score suggests strong instructional effectiveness within a tighter, higher-poverty, smaller-community setting.