Astor Elementary School vs Beverly Cleary School

Astor Elementary School and Beverly Cleary School sit 5.6 miles apart in Portland, Oregon, and land within 0.2 points of each other overall — Astor at 9.2/10 (ranked #34 of 1,226 Oregon schools) and Beverly Cleary at 9.0/10 (ranked #57). At that level, both schools are genuinely exceptional, but the gap between them in underlying metrics is wider than the headline ratings suggest, and the direction of that gap depends entirely on what a family values.

Beverly Cleary School holds a clear academic edge: its academic score of 9.8/10 outpaces Astor Elementary School's 8.9/10 by nearly a full point — a meaningful delta that reflects current proficiency levels on state assessments. Astor flips the script on growth, scoring 9.6/10 against Beverly Cleary's 8.9/10. That 0.7-point growth advantage means students at Astor are gaining ground faster year over year, regardless of where they start — a signal that matters especially for families whose children enter below grade level or are looking for a school that actively accelerates progress.

The demographic and resource picture separates these two schools sharply. Astor Elementary serves 375 students with a student-teacher ratio of 15.6:1 and a free/reduced lunch rate of 64%, indicating a high-need, lower-income population in a comparatively intimate setting. Beverly Cleary enrolls 558 students at a 20.7:1 ratio with only 12% qualifying for free/reduced lunch — a more affluent, larger student body with notably fewer individualized adult interactions per child. The ratio gap of 5.1 students per teacher is not trivial: at scale, it translates to meaningfully less one-on-one time daily.

Both schools serve grades KG–08, so families can commit through middle school without a transition. That structural equivalence aside, the schools are operating in different contexts: Beverly Cleary's top-tier academic score reflects a higher-income, higher-baseline population, while Astor's exceptional growth score suggests strong instructional lift even within a more economically diverse student body.