Data-Driven Education Journalism for the Evergreen State
Education News & Data
Local education reporting from every corner of Washington, grounded in Washington Department of Education data.
Washington produced record graduates in 2025, but the rate fell for the second straight year as the cohort grew faster than the diploma count.
Low-income students are chronically absent at 35.4% vs. 19.0% for their peers — a 16.4-point gap that has grown by a third since the pandemic.
Washington's attendance recovery follows a nearly perfect gradient by age — younger students are bouncing back while high schoolers remain stuck near their pandemic peak.
Washington's 3,777 foster youth have seen their chronic absence rate flatline at 41% for three straight years, even as other vulnerable groups continue recovering.
From a 2022 peak of 41 majority-absent districts, Washington has cut the count by more than half. The 18 that remain are concentrated in tribal communities and tiny rural schools where the barriers to attendance are structural.
Native American chronic absenteeism reached 45.6% in Washington, with tribal school districts reporting rates above 60% and a widening gap with white students.
A 4,480-student district on the Olympic Peninsula has stayed below the state average for 11 straight years, with a 2025 chronic rate one-sixth of the statewide norm.
Elementary schools have recovered nearly half their COVID attendance losses, but high school chronic absenteeism remains within 1.5 points of the pandemic peak.
Jeff Foertsch, a 25-year Prescott educator, takes the superintendency after helping the district avert dissolution. The recovery plan ahead.
About 22,900 students who are currently homeless in Washington are chronically absent — 51.1% — but two rural districts post rates under 10%, suggesting what intensive support can do.
Seattle has a below-average overall chronic rate of 23.4% but a 17.8-point gap between white and Black students — a disparity that widened after the pandemic.
In raw numbers, 296,544 Washington students were chronically absent in 2024-25 — 128,000 more than before the pandemic. The cumulative toll since COVID: 1.48 million student-years.
One in three Hispanic students in Washington is chronically absent, and the gap with white students has widened from 4.9 to 8.9 percentage points since the pandemic.
After three years of steady improvement, Tacoma's chronic absenteeism rate rose 2.3 points to 36.2% in 2025 — the largest reversal among Washington's top 10 districts.
After three years of improvement, Washington's chronic absence rate barely budged in 2025, leaving 296,544 students missing too much school.
