Washington's pandemic recovery, by the numbers: still 8 points below 2019
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.
Published May 15, 2026 · updated May 16, 2026pandemicrecoverytest scoresSBA
−8 / −8 pp
Where Washington's SBA math and ELA proficiency rates sit in 2024-25 compared with the 2018-19 pre-pandemic baseline (enrollment-weighted)
In 2018-19 — the last full school year before the pandemic — Washington's enrollment-weighted SBA proficiency rate was 48% in math and 61% in ELA. Two years are missing from the trend line that follows, and not by accident: SBA wasn't administered in spring 2020 (the federal government waived the requirement when schools closed in March), and spring 2021 was replaced with a small representative-sample assessment given in fall 2021 — OSPI tested grades 3 and 7 for ELA, 5 and 10 for math, plus 8th-grade science, rather than the universal SBA. That sampled assessment is not directly comparable to the full SBA and we don't chart it. The first comparable post-pandemic year at scale is 2021-22, which came in at 38% math / 54% ELA — a 10-point drop in math and a 7-point drop in ELA from 2018-19. The expectation since has been recovery.
Washington enrollment-weighted SBA proficiency rate (% meeting standard), 2018-19 through 2024-25
ELA proficientMath proficient
OSPI Washington State Report Card via data.wa.gov Socrata (assessment_2018_19, assessment_2017_18 confirms the 2018-19 anchor at 48% math / 62% ELA, virtually identical, so the pre-pandemic baseline is stable). Weighted by 2024-25 school enrollment. The chart skips 2019-20 (SBA not administered — federal waiver) and 2020-21 (replaced by a sampled fall-2021 interim assessment covering only some grades; not comparable to the universal SBA).
Three years past the 2021-22 floor, math has nudged up two percentage points and ELA has slipped one. The state remains roughly eight points below where it was on both subjects in 2018-19. At the current pace of math recovery (~1 pp/year), full restoration is about a decade away. ELA isn't on a recovery trajectory at all — it has been flat-to-down for four years.
The school-level distribution
Underneath the flat aggregate, schools are moving in three roughly equal-sized groups (measured against the 2021-22 trough, not against 2018-19).
Direction of change in combined SBA math + ELA proficiency, Washington schools 2021-22 → 2024-25
WA K12 Academic Atlas history.json; 1,934 schools with a complete math+ELA series.
Roughly: 41% gaining ground from 2021-22, 30% treading water, 29% still slipping three years past the trough. The geographic and demographic patterns of the slipping schools — and of the gainers — are the story underneath the headline.
Why the recovery is so muted
Three forces are commonly cited for the muted recovery, and at least two of them are visible in this dataset. Chronic absenteeism has clawed back from the 2021-22 floor but is still about 12 percentage points below the pre-pandemic baseline (see the attendance map) — kids who aren't in the room don't gain ground. Cohort effects from the 2020-21 remote-instruction year are roughly consistent with what NAEP sees nationally: 4th-grade scores have begun to recover (NAEP math G4 was 235 in 2022, 238 in 2024), while 8th-grade scores are still falling (NAEP math G8 was 276 in 2022, 274 in 2024) — see the NAEP piece. Staffing turnover shows up in every school-board meeting in the state but isn't surfaced at the building level in OSPI's public data, so we can't quantify its role from this dataset alone.
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Six years on, Washington is still 8 percentage points below its 2018-19 SBA pre-pandemic baseline on both math (48% → 40%) and ELA (61% → 53%). Since the 2021-22 post-pandemic trough, math has nudged up 2 points and ELA has slipped 1. Of 1,934 schools with a full series, 561 are still slipping.
Source: WA K12 Academic Atlas · https://waschools.org/research/pandemic-recovery-scoreboard/
Methodology
Source for 2021-22 through 2024-25 SBA is the WA K12 Academic Atlas history.json file, which carries per-school SBA math and ELA percent-meeting-standard for each year, plus per-school enrollment from the schools dataset. The 2018-19 anchor was pulled directly from OSPI's 2018-19 assessment file on data.wa.gov (Socrata dataset 5y3z-mgxd), 756,161 school-level rows, filtered to All-Students × All-Grades for each subject and joined to the atlas's schools by schoolcode. Statewide rates are enrollment-weighted using the most recent (2024-25) enrollment as the weight: for each year, we sum (proficiency × enrollment) across schools with reported data and divide by total weight. School-level direction buckets are computed on the sum of math and ELA percentage-point changes between 2021-22 and 2024-25, across the 1,934 schools that have a complete math + ELA series in both years (about 80% of the spine; schools added or closed between the years are excluded). We use 2024-25 enrollment as a constant weight to avoid "recovery" reflecting enrollment shifts rather than score shifts; this is conservative — if anything, the post-pandemic decline is slightly worse than reported here in the small districts that lost enrollment.
Sources
OSPI Washington State Report Card — SBA Math and ELA, 2018-19, and 2021-22 through 2024-25
data.wa.gov Socrata dataset 5y3z-mgxd (assessment_2018_19) — pulled directly for the pre-pandemic anchor
WA K12 Academic Atlas history.json (per-school year-over-year trend file)
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.