WA K12 Academic Atlas
Original analysis from the WA K12 Academic Atlas dataset — every public and private school in Washington, twelve public data sources joined.
October 1, 2026
Public-school enrollment fell to 1,100,053 in fall 2025, down 8,041 from the year before and 39,000 below 2018-19. Sixty-three of the 91 districts with 3,000 or more students shrank. Evergreen and Vancouver in Clark County lost the most students; Clover Park, Bellevue, and Highline grew. Online schools added 1,400 students while everything else lost 9,400.
September 25, 2026
Marysville was declared financially insolvent in June 2024, closed Marysville Middle School in June 2025, and came out from under enhanced state oversight in December 2025. OSPI's 2025-26 data is the first full look at what the district looks like after all that. Enrollment is down 14% since 2018-19. Math proficiency is 27%, against 41% statewide. One in six Marysville Pilchuck students was suspended or expelled in 2024-25, the highest rate of any large high school in Washington.
September 19, 2026
Friday Harbor High School gained 38 combined percentage points on the state math and ELA tests in one year. South Whidbey High gained 31. Downing Elementary in Tacoma lost 36 and Naches Valley High lost 35. Among 1,730 schools with at least 200 students, 194 moved up by 10 or more combined points and 158 moved down as far.
September 15, 2026
The new state test results reordered all 23 of the atlas's proficiency-ranked lists. Seven got a new number one, including Medina Elementary on the Eastside, Columbia Elementary in Bellingham, and Horizon Middle in Spokane. Jing Mei Elementary climbed from 20th to 5th statewide and Sunset Primary from 25th to 5th in Pierce County. The top tens barely moved: on average 9 of 10 schools kept their place.
September 10, 2026
Enrollment-weighted SBA proficiency moved half a point up in math and half a point down in ELA this year, to 41% and 52%. Seven years after the pandemic, Washington is still 7 points below its 2018-19 math rate and 10 points below in ELA. Only 1 in 5 schools has regained its own pre-pandemic math level, and 1 in 7 its ELA level.
September 1, 2026
Seattle Public Schools and the Seattle Education Association face an 11:59 p.m. deadline on September 1 to avoid a strike that would keep about 50,000 students home on the first day of school. The district's offer guarantees raises of 2.6, 3.6 and 2.6 percent over three years, in line with the state's inflation factor. The union wants that inflation adjustment plus 1.5, 2 and 2.5 percent for teachers, and plus 4 percent a year for paraeducators and office staff. Both sides say the harder disagreement is the district's plan to fold its special education pathways into two models offered at every school.
July 1, 2026
Washington's largest school district closed a $104 million budget gap for 2025-26 largely with one-time money, and is now closing another $75–87 million for 2026-27. The cumulative cost: a general fund balance that has fallen from $175.8 million in 2022 to a projected $28.7 million — and that the district's own status-quo forecast shows going negative in 2027. The gap has three causes: state funding that follows a shrinking enrollment, a funding model that pays less than what the district actually spends, and a state lid on how much local levies can collect.
June 10, 2026
Across the classes of 2024, 2025, and 2026, 1,070 Washington students were named National Merit semifinalists — roughly the top 1 percent of the state’s junior-year PSAT test-takers. Ten schools, all in King County, account for more than half of them. 79% came from public schools, Interlake alone out-produced Lakeside, and a 609-student public STEM school matches Lakeside semifinalist-for-semifinalist per capita.
June 10, 2026
Half of Washington's public high-school graduates aren't enrolled in any college 16 months after graduation. State wage records now show what they earn, school by school: a $30,500 median five years out, a county-to-county spread of nearly $9,000 — and apprenticeship completers out-earning bachelor's holders at every year the state can measure.
May 16, 2026
Washington's public schools have about 31,000 fewer students than they did the year before the pandemic — a 2.7% net decline. The biggest urban and inner-suburban districts (Seattle, Evergreen-Vancouver, Kent, Issaquah, Vancouver, Renton, Marysville, Spokane, Bellevue, Tacoma) lost the most students. The fastest-growing districts are exurban — Pierce, Snohomish, and Clark counties.
May 15, 2026
Three years after the 2021-22 trough, 1,093 of Washington's 1,934 schools with a complete state-test record have posted combined gains on the SBA math and ELA assessments. 175 jumped by 20 percentage points or more combined. Most of the biggest movers are elementary schools in south King County, Spokane Valley, and the Yakima Valley.
May 15, 2026
Sixteen months after they walk across the stage, about 1 in 3 Washington public-school graduates is enrolled at a 4-year college, 1 in 6 is at a 2-year or career-and-technical college, and 1 in 2 isn't enrolled at any college at all. The 4-year share ranges from 75% at the top (Mercer Island) to under 15% across much of the Capital Region.
May 15, 2026
Enrollment-weighted SBA proficiency in 2018-19 was 48% in math and 61% in ELA. In 2024-25, it's 40% and 53% — eight percentage points below pre-pandemic on both subjects. Since the 2021-22 trough, math has nudged up two points and ELA has slipped one. About a third of the state's schools are still moving the wrong direction.
May 14, 2026
On the 2024 NAEP — the only test that lets you compare states apples-to-apples — Washington's 4th- and 8th-graders scored about the same as the national public-school average in both math and reading. Twenty years ago Washington was meaningfully above the national average; that gap has closed.
May 14, 2026
Washington's state-weighted average graduation rate is 84.5%. Selah, a Yakima Valley district of about a thousand high-school students, tops the state at 97.7%. The full leaderboard mixes the obvious Eastside giants with several small districts in the Yakima Valley, the Cascades foothills, and south Sound suburbs.
May 14, 2026
Two-thirds of Washington's 2022-25 Harvard, Princeton, and MIT admissions came from public schools, not private prep. Interlake High School in Bellevue placed 13 — more than any school in the state outside Lakeside. On 4-year matriculation, Mercer Island, Eastlake, Bainbridge, and Skyline all clear 67% — competitive with anything the private side will tell you about its alumni.
May 14, 2026
OSPI's pre-pandemic statewide regular-attendance rate was about 84% (2018-19). It cratered to 66% in 2021-22 and has clawed back to 72% in 2023-24 — still 12 points below where it was. Only 12% of Washington public schools have reached the 90% benchmark again. About 32,000 students attend a school where fewer than half of kids meet the regular-attendance threshold.
May 13, 2026
Sixty-seven Washington high schools placed at least one student at Harvard, Princeton, or MIT between 2022 and 2025 — 166 admits in total. Five schools account for more than a third of them. The mix is more public than people assume.
May 13, 2026
At the median Washington comprehensive public high school, 62% of seniors leave with at least one college credit already on the books — earned through Running Start, College in the High School, AP, IB, or career-and-technical dual-credit programs. Twenty-seven schools clear 90%.
May 13, 2026
Washington's statewide discipline rate in 2023-24 was 4.5% — about 1 in 22 students. For Black students it was 11.3%, for Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander students 13.9%, for American Indian/Alaska Native students 11.6%. At the 217 Washington schools that publish non-suppressed rates for both Black and White students, the median Black rate runs 5.9 points higher than the White rate at the same building. 92% of those schools show Black students disciplined more often than White students.
May 11, 2026
Test scores, graduation rates, attendance, discipline — Washington collects all of it for public schools and posts it online, school by school. Private schools, about one in six of the state's K-12 schools, aren't required to report any of it. So no one does.
May 11, 2026
Among the 254 Washington comprehensive public high schools whose AP results OSPI publishes, students at the lowest-poverty quarter sit a median of 42 AP exams per 100 kids enrolled. At the highest-poverty quarter, the median is two. The correlation between a school's poverty rate and its AP load is about as strong as anything in the data.
May 11, 2026
Going back to the early 1970s, the WIAA has crowned thousands of team state champions across dozens of sports. Twelve schools account for roughly a third of them. One — Bellarmine Prep in Tacoma — has more than any public school in the state.