Summary:
Zip code 90405 in Santa Monica, California, is served by two public high schools—Santa Monica High and Olympic High (Continuation)—operating under the highly-rated Santa Monica-Malibu Unified district, which creates two distinct educational pathways for local students.
Santa Monica High is a large, top-performing comprehensive school consistently ranked in the state's top 5%, with a 98.9% graduation rate and strong academic results, particularly in English. In contrast, Olympic High (Continuation) is a much smaller school designed for students at risk of not graduating, featuring a significantly higher chronic absenteeism rate and lower test scores, though it achieves a 65.2% graduation rate with this challenging population.
The data reveals a striking situation where the continuation school receives more funding per student and has a much lower student-teacher ratio, yet faces profound challenges, highlighting that factors like chronic absenteeism are major drivers of academic outcomes. For parents, this means the zip code offers both an elite comprehensive high school and a critical safety-net school, with the district's overall high performance masking substantial differences between these two student populations.
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