Top Public High Schools in Washington by SAT Mean
The statewide public high school SAT leaderboard is the most concentrated of any list in this batch. Eight of the top ten schools sit within a fifteen-mile radius of downtown Bellevue, the Lake Washington and Issaquah school districts contribute six schools between them, and the only entries from outside the immediate Eastside are Mercer Island (just across I-90 from Seattle) and Blaine — the last a striking outlier that requires its own explanation.
Nikola Tesla STEM High School in Redmond leads at 1402, fully seventy-nine points ahead of second-place Mercer Island. Tesla, a Lake Washington School District lottery-admitted choice school of about 600 students with no academic admission prerequisites, runs a 100 percent AP participation rate and a curriculum built around STEM project work. Mercer Island High School (1323), the only public secondary on its single-school-district island, follows.
Third place — Blaine High School in Whatcom County, immediately south of the Canadian border — is the surprise on the list. Blaine enrolls under 600 students and posts a 1316 SAT mean despite a 87 percent graduation rate; the school's geographic position adjacent to the Peace Arch and its historic role serving cross-border families help explain the unusual academic profile of its participating cohort. Issaquah High (1310), Redmond High (1308), Eastlake (1293), Skyline (1285), Interlake (1280), Newport (Bellevue, 1274), and North Creek (Bothell, 1273) close out the top ten in the more expected configuration.
A notable pattern is the spread within the Bellevue School District itself. Newport Senior High at 1274 and Interlake at 1280 sit only six points apart on SAT, but Interlake's 79.6 percent graduation rate is roughly sixteen points below Newport's. That gap is largely an artifact of Interlake's IB Diploma Programme structure — running a high-end Advanced Learning cohort that completes the IB Diploma in tenth and eleventh grade alongside a more diverse general-population cohort — and is widely tracked in Bellevue School Board reporting.
The broader picture is striking by national standards. Five of the top ten schools enroll more than 1,800 students apiece, and several enroll more than 2,300 — meaning the elite SAT means here are not artifacts of small selective cohorts but full-comprehensive results. The closest analogue elsewhere in the country would be the wealthiest suburban districts in the New York and Boston metros. The dominance of Lake Washington and Issaquah school districts in particular reflects two decades of in-migration tied to Microsoft, Amazon, T-Mobile, and the broader Eastside tech corridor.
Statewide, the SAT leaderboard is dominated by selective-magnet and gifted-program publics on the Eastside (Tesla STEM, International School, Interlake) plus Mercer Island. The Spokane and Tacoma top schools (Saint George's, Mead, Curtis) sit a tier below the Puget Sound apex but well above the WA public median. Walla Walla, Wenatchee, and Tri-Cities (Richland, Hanford) contribute the strongest non-metro entries to the long tail of the list.
Ranked schools
- 001NIKOLA TESLA STEM HIGH SCHOOLLAKE WASHINGTON SCHOOL DISTRICT · KING1402
- 002MERCER ISLAND HIGH SCHOOLMERCER ISLAND SCHOOL DISTRICT · KING1323
- 003BLAINE HIGH SCHOOLBLAINE SCHOOL DISTRICT · WHATCOM1316
- 004ISSAQUAH HIGH SCHOOLISSAQUAH SCHOOL DISTRICT · KING1310
- 005REDMOND HIGH SCHOOLLAKE WASHINGTON SCHOOL DISTRICT · KING1308
- 006EASTLAKE HIGH SCHOOLLAKE WASHINGTON SCHOOL DISTRICT · KING1293
- 007SKYLINE HIGH SCHOOLISSAQUAH SCHOOL DISTRICT · KING1285
- 008INTERLAKE SENIOR HIGH SCHOOLBELLEVUE SCHOOL DISTRICT · KING1280
- 009NEWPORT SENIOR HIGH SCHOOLBELLEVUE SCHOOL DISTRICT · KING1274
- 010NORTH CREEK HIGH SCHOOLNORTHSHORE SCHOOL DISTRICT · KING1273
- 011LAKE WASHINGTON HIGH SCHOOLLAKE WASHINGTON SCHOOL DISTRICT · KING1268
- 012KAMIAK HIGH SCHOOLMUKILTEO SCHOOL DISTRICT · SNOHOMISH1263
- 013MOUNTLAKE TERRACE HIGH SCHOOLEDMONDS SCHOOL DISTRICT · SNOHOMISH1262
- 014PORT TOWNSEND HIGH SCHOOLPORT TOWNSEND SCHOOL DISTRICT · JEFFERSON1261
- 015BAINBRIDGE HIGH SCHOOLBAINBRIDGE ISLAND SCHOOL DISTRICT · KITSAP1260
- 016WALLA WALLA HIGH SCHOOLWALLA WALLA PUBLIC SCHOOLS · WALLA WALLA1260
- 017LIBERTY SR HIGH SCHOOLISSAQUAH SCHOOL DISTRICT · KING1256
- 018INGLEMOOR HSNORTHSHORE SCHOOL DISTRICT · KING1256
- 019LINCOLN HIGH SCHOOLSEATTLE SCHOOL DISTRICT NO. 1 · KING1247
- 020EDMONDS WOODWAY HIGH SCHOOLEDMONDS SCHOOL DISTRICT · SNOHOMISH1246
- 021BELLINGHAM HIGH SCHOOLBELLINGHAM SCHOOL DISTRICT · WHATCOM1245
- 022GLACIER PEAK HIGH SCHOOLSNOHOMISH SCHOOL DISTRICT · SNOHOMISH1245
- 023CAMAS HIGH SCHOOLCAMAS SCHOOL DISTRICT · CLARK1244
- 024SHOREWOOD HIGH SCHOOLSHORELINE SCHOOL DISTRICT · KING1244
- 025JUANITA HIGH SCHOOLLAKE WASHINGTON SCHOOL DISTRICT · KING1243
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