Washington's most improved schools since the pandemic
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.
Published May 15, 2026 · updated May 16, 2026pandemic recoverytest scoreselementaryimprovement
1,093 / 1,934
Washington schools that gained on combined SBA math + ELA proficiency between 2021-22 and 2024-25
Three years after the 2021-22 school year — the worst year on record for Washington state-test proficiency — most of the conversation about K-12 schools has been about how little ground has been recovered. The state's enrollment-weighted recovery is real but small (math up two points, ELA down one).
Underneath that statewide aggregate, though, the picture varies enormously: 1,093 schools have gained ground on the combined math + ELA tests since 2021-22, 841 have slipped, and 499 jumped by more than 10 percentage points combined. Here are the schools that gained the most.
Biggest gainers, combined SBA math + ELA proficiency (2021-22 → 2024-25)
Neely O'Brien Elementary (Kent SD)
+54 pp
Olympia Regional Learning Academy
+52 pp
McDonald Elementary (Central Valley SD)
+52 pp
Lea Hill Elementary (Auburn SD)
+49 pp
Campbell Hill Elementary (Renton SD)
+48 pp
Zillah High School (Zillah SD)
+47 pp
Dearborn Park Intl (Seattle SD)
+43 pp
University Elementary (Central Valley SD)
+42 pp
West Valley City School (Spokane)
+42 pp
Midland Elementary (Franklin Pierce SD)
+40 pp
Rainier Prep (charter, Seattle)
+38 pp
WA K12 Academic Atlas history.json. Restricted to schools with enrollment ≥200 in 2024-25 and a complete math + ELA series in both years.
It's a list dominated by smaller and lower-grade schools — of the eleven names above, seven are elementary, two are middle schools (West Valley City School is a K-8 reported under MIDDLE; Rainier Prep is a 5-12 charter reported the same way), and two are high schools (Zillah, in the Yakima Valley, and Olympia Regional Learning Academy, an option school in Olympia SD). Geographically, south King County (Kent, Auburn, the Skyway/Renton area), Spokane and Spokane Valley, and the South Sound (Tacoma's Franklin Pierce SD) account for most of the top of the list.
The statewide median is almost flat
The headline gains above are real, but they sit at the top of a distribution that's mostly noise. The typical Washington school's math score moved up about two percentage points, and its ELA score moved down a fraction of a point. About a third of schools are still slipping.
Where Washington's 1,934 schools landed: combined SBA math + ELA proficiency change, 2021-22 → 2024-25
WA K12 Academic Atlas history.json. Buckets defined on the sum of math and ELA percentage-point changes.
Two important caveats. Small-school noise: schools with under 200 students can swing dramatically on a few dozen test-takers. The chart above is restricted to enrollment ≥200; the bucket counts use all 1,934 schools with a complete series. The biggest "gainer" outside this filter — Queen Anne Elementary in Seattle, enrollment 179 — jumped 102 percentage points combined; we excluded it because at that size one cohort's results dominate. The bigger context, though, is how much ground is still missing: enrollment-weighted state proficiency in 2018-19 was about 48% in math and 61% in ELA. At 40% / 53% in 2024-25, the median Washington student is roughly 8 percentage points behind where students were before the pandemic on both subjects — even at the schools above, where gains since 2021-22 have been large, the absolute level is in most cases below where the same schools were six years ago. The recovery scoreboard walks through this in detail.
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1,093 of 1,934 Washington schools posted combined gains on the state's math + ELA tests since the 2021-22 pandemic-trough year. 175 jumped 20+ percentage points combined. Most of the biggest movers are elementary schools in south King County, Spokane Valley, and the Yakima Valley.
Source: WA K12 Academic Atlas · https://waschools.org/research/most-improved-schools-since-pandemic/
Methodology
Source is the WA K12 Academic Atlas history.json file, which carries per-school SBA math and ELA percent-meeting-standard for each year from 2021-22 through 2024-25. "Gain" is the simple sum of the math and ELA percentage-point changes between 2021-22 and 2024-25. The headline-list chart is restricted to schools with enrollment ≥200 in 2024-25 to avoid small-N noise; the statewide bucket counts use all 1,934 schools that have a complete math + ELA series in both years (about 80% of the spine — schools added or closed between the two years are excluded). "Pandemic trough" refers to 2021-22, the lowest year on record for Washington's state-test results. Pre-pandemic anchor: the 2018-19 statewide enrollment-weighted proficiency rates (Math 48.4%, ELA 61.0%) come from OSPI's 2018-19 SBA file pulled directly from the data.wa.gov Socrata endpoint — see the recovery-scoreboard piece for the full trajectory. SBA participation: at the per-school level, OSPI's reported participation rates in 2021-22 were already high (median school: 97-98%; enrollment-weighted statewide: ~95% in math and ELA). So the composition effect — struggling students returning to the testing pool inflating apparent gains — is small at the school level, though it explains some of the small statewide aggregate movement. The bigger reason the recovery is muted is simply that 2021-22 → 2024-25 has produced only a few points of statewide movement.
Sources
OSPI Washington State Report Card — SBA Math and ELA, 2021-22 and 2024-25
OSPI school directory — enrollment and grade-span filters
These figures come from the WA K12 Academic Atlas — an interactive map of every K-12 school in Washington, assembled from twelve public data sources. Browse the map · see the rankings. Reporters: see the note on the research index.