Advanced Placement is the most common on-ramp to college-level work in an American high school: take the class, sit the exam, and a score of 3 or higher often turns into college credit. It is also, in Washington, distributed about as unevenly as anything in public education.
We looked at every comprehensive public high school in the state — public schools coded HIGH in the OSPI directory, with low grade ≤9, high grade 12, and enrollment ≥200 (329 schools). Of those, 254 appear in OSPI's October SAT/AP report (the only public source of school-level AP results in Washington); the other 75, including some large Eastern Washington and Spokane-area schools, don't, and we set them aside — see the data-coverage note below. Among the 254 schools we can see, we counted AP exams sat in 2024-25 against total enrollment, and sorted by the share of students from low-income families.
| Poverty quartile (share low-income) | Schools | Median AP exams per 100 students | Share of schools offering any AP |
|---|---|---|---|
| Q1 — lowest poverty | 64 | 42 | 94% |
| Q2 | 63 | 20 | 84% |
| Q3 | 63 | 11 | 79% |
| Q4 — highest poverty | 64 | 2 | 69% |
Denominator is total school enrollment; AP-takers concentrate in grades 11-12, so per-upperclassman rates run roughly double these. The shape is the point: each step up in poverty roughly halves the typical AP load, and in the poorest quartile nearly a third of schools sat no AP exams at all.
How often "zero" actually happens
Of the 254 comprehensive public high schools whose AP results are in the OSPI report, 47 — about one in five — sat zero AP exams in 2024-25. Together they enroll roughly 21,500 students. Most are small rural schools where staffing even one AP section is hard, or specialty / option schools that have moved to Cambridge AICE, IB, College in the High School, or Running Start dual-enrollment instead. So zero AP volume isn't, on its own, evidence of a failing school — it usually means "college-level coursework lives in another lane here."
| School | District / area | AP exams per 100 students |
|---|---|---|
| Nikola Tesla STEM High School | Lake Washington SD (Redmond) | ~223 |
| Newport Senior High School | Bellevue SD | ~143 |
| Bellevue High School | Bellevue SD | ~126 |
| Eastlake High School | Lake Washington SD (Sammamish) | ~116 |
| Lincoln High School (Tacoma) | Tacoma SD | ~113 |
| Redmond High School | Lake Washington SD | ~111 |
The data we can't see
OSPI's school-level SAT/AP results live in a single annual PDF — College Board doesn't publish school-level numbers, and OSPI's open-data portal carries nearly every other report-card field except this one. The PDF covers 474 schools statewide, and after name-matching to OSPI's directory, 254 of the 329 comprehensive public high schools have AP results attached. The other 75 are missing from the PDF entirely — including Mount Si (Snoqualmie), Ferris and Mt Spokane (Spokane area), Davis and Eisenhower (Yakima), Cleveland STEM (Seattle), Gov. John Rogers (Puyallup), and several others. Some of these schools almost certainly have substantial AP programs; we just can't see them here. Whatever the full statewide picture is, it's a fair bet the gradient is at least this steep, because the missing schools skew toward the kinds of places (large suburban districts on the Spokane side, mid-poverty Yakima Valley districts) that would land in the middle two quartiles anyway.
The catch with reading too much into it
AP volume is an input, not an outcome — a school can serve its students well through IB, Running Start, College in the High School, or AICE and still show zero AP. So this is not a ranking of school quality. What it is is a map of access to one specific, portable, widely-recognized form of college-level coursework — and on that measure, where a Washington kid goes to high school still does a lot of the talking.