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.
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.