Cedar Mill Elementary School vs Lent Elementary School

Lent Elementary School ranks #28 of 1,226 Oregon elementary schools, placing it in the top 2.3% statewide. Cedar Mill Elementary School earns a strong #84 in the same pool — top 7% — but that 56-position gap translates to a meaningful difference in overall context. On the 10-point composite scale, Lent Elementary School scores 9.3 to Cedar Mill Elementary School's 8.8, a 0.5-point gap driven largely by growth performance rather than raw academic output.

The academic and growth scores tell two different stories. Cedar Mill Elementary School's academic score of 9.7/10 outpaces Lent Elementary School's 8.1/10 by 1.6 points — a concrete lead in current proficiency levels. The growth score reverses that picture: Lent Elementary School posts a 9.9/10 against Cedar Mill Elementary School's 8.9/10, a full point higher. That gap indicates Lent students are advancing faster relative to their starting points, which can matter more than snapshot proficiency for families whose children are entering below grade level or who weight year-over-year progress heavily.

Cedar Mill Elementary School enrolls 329 students versus Lent Elementary School's 273, and the student-teacher ratio differs sharply: 18.3:1 at Cedar Mill against 13.7:1 at Lent — 4.6 fewer students per teacher at Lent. The free and reduced-price lunch rates reflect very different community demographics: 18% at Cedar Mill Elementary School versus 73% at Lent Elementary School, signaling that Lent serves a substantially higher share of lower-income families and likely draws more federal Title I support and targeted intervention resources as a result.

Both schools cover the same grade span, kindergarten through fifth grade, and sit 11 miles apart within Portland. A family cannot split the difference by grade level — the choice is a full K–5 commitment either way. Lent's combination of a high growth score and lower student-teacher ratio suggests strong instructional attention per child; Cedar Mill's higher academic score points to a student body that arrives and performs at elevated proficiency benchmarks, a difference that often tracks with neighborhood income levels given the wide FRL gap between the two schools.