Pull up the Washington State Report Card and you can see, for any public school, the share of students meeting standard on the state ELA and math tests, the four-year graduation rate, the regular-attendance rate, the discipline rate, dual-credit participation — even how many graduates enrolled in college the next fall. It's published per building, refreshed yearly, free.
Now try the same for a private school. There is nothing — not because private schools perform badly, or well, but because Washington does not require them to report academic outcomes at all. The state's private-school oversight, run through the State Board of Education's approval process, covers things like instructional hours and health-and-safety compliance, not test scores or graduation rates. The only private-school census, the federal NCES Private School Universe Survey, collects enrollment, grade span, religious affiliation, and student-teacher ratio — and nothing about how students do.
What the public record actually contains
| Public | Private | |
|---|---|---|
| Schools | 2,438 | 503 |
| Total enrollment | ~1.10 million | ~79,000 |
| Share of all WA K-12 schools | 83% | 17% |
| State-test proficiency (SBA ELA/Math) published | 2,066 schools | 0 |
| Four-year graduation rate published | 447 schools* | 0 |
| Regular-attendance rate published | 2,332 schools | 0 |
| Discipline rate published | 1,441 schools | 0 |
*Graduation rate is reported only for schools with a graduating cohort — high schools and K-12 schools.
So when a private school advertises that its graduates "attend top colleges" or that it has a "100% college-acceptance rate," there is no public dataset to check it against. The claim, and the absence of any way to verify it, are — in Washington — the entire record.
Why it matters
Roughly 79,000 Washington students attend a private school. Their families are making one of the biggest decisions a parent makes and, by law, doing it with less hard information than the state hands out for free about every public school down the street. It also makes any apples-to-apples "best schools" comparison structurally impossible: a ranking that mixes public and private schools is, at best, mixing measured outcomes with reputation and price.