Cloonan School, Stamford CT - Test Scores & Data

Original Research by School Decision on Cloonan School

Cloonan School is a public middle school serving grades six through eight in Stamford, a mixed-use city where corporate headquarters, waterfront multifamily housing, and single-family neighborhoods coexist. The school sits in a district undergoing substantial curriculum reform, with new structured-literacy instruction rolling out and a district-wide rewrite of PreK-12 curriculum to align with standards and add cultural responsiveness.

The school's enrollment is small for its grade band at about five hundred students, drawn from a student body that is majority Hispanic with substantial shares of Black, white, and Asian students. About three in five qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. The district has just begun publishing Stamford-wide state testing results, so this is the school's first year of comparable public data.

Cloonan's academic profile shows low overall proficiency on Connecticut state assessments. In English language arts across all tested grades, about half of students score at proficient level or above. In math, the rate is lower: about four in ten. In science at grade eight, the proficiency rate is just under three in ten. Within tested grades, English language arts shows the highest performance in grade six and the lowest in grade eight. Math proficiency trends downward by grade, with grade eight showing proficiency around one in eight students. These results place Cloonan in the bottom quartile of school proficiency across the county's districts.

The school participates in the Stamford School District's curriculum changes, including the adoption of Amplify Core Knowledge Language Arts for foundational literacy instruction. How these shifts influence results will take time to emerge.

Stamford itself is a city of rapid growth and housing development, particularly in multifamily units near the waterfront, and offers strong public transit anchored by Metro-North rail and CTtransit bus service. The commercial core downtown is walkable and has genuine street life, though much of the city outside the core maintains a suburban pattern. Housing values in the Stamford area are above state average and have appreciated steadily. Families choosing Cloonan are selecting a school in an urban-to-suburban setting with significant economic transition underway and a school district actively reshaping its curriculum foundation.

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Academic performance

How students perform on state tests, by grade, set against the district.

Math

Grade 628%

School 28% · District 30% · ▼ 2 pts below district

▼ 11 pts below state median · ▼ 31 pts below county median

Grade 721%

School 21% · District 28% · ▼ 7 pts below district

▼ 22 pts below state median · ▼ 37 pts below county median

Grade 812%

School 12% · District 24% · ▼ 12 pts below district

▼ 28 pts below state median · ▼ 46 pts below county median

English language arts

Grade 635%

School 35% · District 35%

▼ 16 pts below state median · ▼ 22 pts below county median

Grade 732%

School 32% · District 39% · ▼ 7 pts below district

▼ 18 pts below state median · ▼ 36 pts below county median

Grade 826%

School 26% · District 37% · ▼ 11 pts below district

▼ 24 pts below state median · ▼ 39 pts below county median

Science

Grade 828%

School 28% · District 38% · ▼ 11 pts below district

▼ 21 pts below state median · ▼ 30 pts below county median

This schoolStamford School District, same grade

Graduation rate (ACGR) reflects the federally published Adjusted Cohort Graduation Rate for the most recent year available. We refresh this data annually at the close of each academic year in June. The federal source publishes a banded rate (for example, "90-94%") instead of an exact number for cohorts small enough to risk identifying individual students. The state distribution chart, where shown, plots every school in the state with a published rate or band; schools whose rate is federally suppressed are excluded. Where the federal source publishes a band rather than an exact rate, the school is placed within its band using a stable, ID-derived offset, so its position is consistent across visits.

Proficiency by household income

Mathematics

Grade 8Lower-income12%Higher-income12%0 pp gap