Summary:
Three schools in Chicago Ridge School District 127-5 serve 1,485 students across PK–8: Ridge Lawn Elementary School and Ridge Central Elementary School serve PK–5, while Elden D Finley Junior High School serves grades 6–8. In 2025–2026, all three schools were below the state proficiency rates in all-grades English language arts (ELA) and math; averaged across the schools, results were 14 percentage points below the state in ELA and 8 points below in math. The central takeaway is that no school matched the state average in either subject.
Ridge Central had the strongest all-grades results: 49% proficiency in ELA and 36% in math, leading the next-highest school by 10 and 3 points, respectively. It was still 7 points below the state in ELA and 3 points below in math. Finley had the lowest math result at 26%—10 points below Central and 14 below the state. Grade-level results show a notable exception: Ridge Lawn reached 57% in grade-5 ELA, 3 points above the state’s 55%, despite its 39% all-grades ELA result.
Results improved over two years, especially in math: the three-school average rose 4 points, compared with a 1-point state increase; average ELA rose 3 points, matching the state’s gain. Science proficiency also increased at each school, including a 25-point rise at Ridge Lawn in grade 5 and a 15-point rise at Finley in grade 8. SchoolDigger gives Central two stars and a 34th-percentile rank, compared with one star and the 25th percentile for Ridge Lawn and one star and the 18th percentile for Finley. As context, 2024–2025 free/reduced lunch eligibility ranged from 54% at Central to 70% at Lawn; student-teacher ratios ranged from 11.5 at Finley to 13.9 at Lawn. These measures describe differences among schools, not reasons for their results.
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