I spent a lot of time looking at those school ratings, and in the end my conclusion was that the rating does not really matter. The rating is determined by three factors: free lunches, ESL students, and parent education levels. (And it’s hard to decouple these three because they are strongly correlated). ESL students perform poorly because they don’t understand English very well, and because they tend to have low-income parents. Free-lunchers and children of uneducated parents perform poorly because they are of below-average intelligence or because their home environments aren’t conducive to learning.

A very low rating could indicate that the school is an unsafe place for your children, but there is no reason to expect that they will perform any better if you put them into a 920 rating Temecula school instead of your neighborhood 780 rating Oceanside school.

Temecula numbers are on par with Carlsbad because residents of Temecula are, on average, almost as well-off and educated as residents of Carlsbad:

Carlsbad students: 18% free lunches, 9% English learners, 60% college graduate parents
Temecula students: 12% free lunches, 8% English learners, 49% college graduate parents

Poway studentss: 11% free lunches, 8% English learners, 73% college graduate parents
Oceanside students: 53% free lunches, 27% English learners, 23% college graduate parents