Bay Area elementary school dethroned as the best in the state

Bay Area schools dominated the top 10 in a new ranking of the state’s best public elementary schools from U.S. News & World Report.

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The 2027 list, published Tuesday, includes six Bay Area schools in the top 10, all located either in the South Bay or the Peninsula. The first Bay Area school to appear on the list was Murdock-Portal Elementary at No. 3, a K-5 school with more than 500 students in San Jose. Though it secured the highest Bay Area rank, the school was dethroned from the No. 1 slot it held last year. 

The only schools ahead of Murdock-Portal were Buckeye Union Mandarin Immersion Charter in El Dorado Hills (No. 1), which was not ranked last year, and Cold Spring Elementary in Santa Barbara (No. 2), which jumped 12 slots from last year. 

Bay Area schools filled the next five places on the rankings. Those schools were: William Faria Elementary in Cupertino (No. 4), North Star Academy in Redwood City, a third through eighth grade school (No. 5), Herbert Hoover Elementary in Palo Alto (No. 6), Covington Elementary in Los Altos (No. 7) and Bullis Charter School (No. 8) in Los Altos. The most impressive jump out of those high-ranking schools was Covington Elementary, a K-6 school with about 400 students that landed at No. 29 last year. 

Rounding out the top 10 of the list were Elkhorn Elementary School in Stockton (No. 9) and Jack L. Weaver Elementary (No. 10) in Los Alamitos, a city in Orange County. 

Farther down the list, several other Bay Area schools also made notable gains from last year.

John Muir Elementary in San Jose climbed to No. 12 from No. 44 last year, while Stevenson Elementary in Mountain View rose to No. 14 from No. 38. Lucille M. Nixon Elementary in Stanford moved up to No. 24 from No. 46 and Arundel Elementary in San Carlos jumped to No. 26 from No. 74.

And out of the 72 elementary schools in San Francisco Unified School District, a North Beach school and a Sunset neighborhood school made significant leaps to the top.

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John Yehall Chin Elementary, a K-5 school with more than 200 students located near Telegraph Hill, went up in the rankings by 206 slots, securing the No. 35 ranking this year. Sunset Elementary, a K-5 school in the city’s Outer Sunset with approximately 400 students, went up by 87 slots, finally cracking the top 50 at No. 46 this year. 

U.S. News also published its list of California’s best middle schools on Tuesday. Bay Area schools made a strong showing on that list too, just with fewer dramatic leaps. (Some schools appear in both rankings because they serve grade levels included in both categories and U.S. News ranks them separately on each list.)

North Star Academy in Redwood City was the first Bay Area school to appear on the middle school rankings at No. 4, up from its No. 6 spot last year. The top 3 schools preceding North Star were all in Southern California: Whitney High School in Cerritos (a combined middle school and high school) at No. 1, Science Academy STEM Magnet in North Hollywood at No. 2 and Oxford Academy in Cypress at No. 3. 

NorCal schools, mostly all from the Bay Area, accounted for the rest of the top 10 middle schools. Those schools were: Joaquin Miller Middle School in San Jose (No. 5), Elkhorn Elementary School, a fourth through eighth grade school in Stockton (No. 6), Bullis Charter School in Los Altos (No. 7), John F. Kennedy Middle School in Cupertino (No. 8), William Hopkins Middle in Fremont (No. 9) and Petaluma Accelerated Charter in Petaluma (No. 10). 

Though U.S. News does not rank elementary and middle schools nationally, its methodology for each state’s best schools factors students’ mathematics and reading proficiency and their test scores in those subjects.

The rankings come as students across the state and nation grapple with massive learning gaps after losing years of in-person instruction during the pandemic, and shrinking enrollment largely tied to declining birthrates.