Understanding school data

How to use this data well

• Visit

  Tour the school and talk with the principal, teachers and other families. Numbers cannot show how a school feels or how it fits your child.

• Ask questions

  Each school’s popup on the map suggests a few questions based on its own numbers.

• Look at growth, not just proficiency

  Test results track family income closely. Growth shows how much students gained compared with similar students across the state.

• Compare similar schools

  Compare schools that serve similar shares of low-income students, English learners and students in special education.

• Use several measures and years

  No single number tells the whole story, and results at small schools can change a lot from year to year.

• Remember these are group numbers

  They describe students as a group. They cannot tell you how your own child will do.

• Check the official source

  The OSPI Report Card has more detail for every school, including results for student groups.

• Charter and private schools

  Charter schools are free public schools: they take the state tests and appear with all the other public schools. Private schools are a separate map layer from the federal Private School Survey; they don't take state tests or report to OSPI, so none of the measures below exist for them.

  Charter schoolsPrivate schools

Reading the numbers and charts

Example The small pictures use made-up example numbers to show the idea. They are not real school data.

• “Met standard”

  The share of tested students who scored at grade level or above on Washington’s state tests. 60% means 6 out of every 10 tested students met the standard.

  Example

• Percentage points are not percent

  If a result goes from 50% to 60%, it went up 10 percentage points. That is also 20 percent more students, so the two words give different numbers. School pages say “points” when they compare two percentages.

  Example

• Average or median?

  The Washington average counts every student in the state together. The median is the school in the middle when all schools are lined up from lowest to highest. “Higher than about 7 in 10 schools” means 7 of every 10 schools have a lower number.

  Example

• Small schools jump around

  In a group of 40 students, one student is 2.5 percentage points. A few students can move a small school’s result a lot from one year to the next, so look at several years before deciding anything.

  Example

• Hidden numbers

  To protect student privacy, OSPI does not report results for groups of fewer than 10 students, and hides some other results. These show as “Not reported” or as a break in a line. A hidden number is not a zero.

  Example

• Trends need several years

  Each year a different group of students takes the tests. One year up or down can just be a different class. There were no state tests in spring 2020, and the shortened fall 2021 tests cannot be compared, so those years are left out.

  Example

• Numbers that move together do not explain each other

  Schools with more low-income students often have lower test results, because of many things inside and outside school. That does not mean the teaching is worse. One test is not the whole school.

  Related is not the same as caused.

  Example

• How our charts work

  A blue dot is the school, an orange diamond is its district, and a gray line is Washington. A shaded band is the middle half of schools. Percentages use a scale from 0 to 100%, and counts and dollars start at zero, so small changes do not look bigger than they are.

  Example

  SchoolDistrictWashingtonMiddle half of schools